Switzerland - Part 3 - Luzern

This is the third post, in a series about my trip to Switzerland.  You can find the previous posts here and here

The third day of the trip to Switzerland was a great mix of experiences.  We jumped into our car and headed for the city of Luzerne.  This is a great town, with a giant body of water nestled up against it - Lake Luzern.  It's also surrounded by several mountains that create a striking panorama.

My oldest daughter, A, was our tour guide for the entire Switzerland adventure.  She decided to have us take a boat across the giant lake, to start our journey toward Mt. Rigi.

All my ladies, on the boat, heading out of the center of Luzern

The city is simply gorgeous - here's a quick video clip of the view that you see from the ship, as you depart from the dock:

As soon as we made our way out onto the Lake, the wind started getting strong.  My wife covered up the baby and I covered them both with my jacket, to keep baby L asleep and warm:

This was an actual steamboat - and you can see the fine Swiss mechanics that were powering the ship, displayed in this video:

Snapshots from the boat, as we moved along the shoreline, towards the mountains:

Yes, those are SWANS in the water...

My son-in-law wants to own a "lake house" here...I picked out this one on the hill...

The amazing thing was how calm and smooth the water was.  Here's a picture that shows the water like a sheet of glass:

Moving further along the shore, you can see that someone went to the effort to paint an immense Swiss flag onto the mountain, above the water.  You can see the large buildings below, for some sort of perspective:

We finally reached our destination of Vitznau, Switzerland.  From the boat, we walked just a few steps to the train station, to ride a train all the way to the top of Mt. Rigi.  This is an amazingly steep train ride. In fact, the steam train that we rode in, is part of a "cog railway - the "teeth" of the wheels act as cogs that grab onto the track below us.

The views from this steep climb are...stunning:

Yeah - the view just gets better and better, doesn't it? ; )

We finally reached the top, called the Rigi Kulm summit.  I believe this was at about 5,900 ft. (if my metric conversion is correct):

Mt. Rigi has something like 50 miles of hiking trails.  I learned, first-hand, that the Swiss really take hiking seriously.  I really love this country ; )  At the summit, you could choose the "difficulty" of your hike up the hill.  The sign below shows you two choices:  young and old ; )

After the short hike (we chose the "young" trail, by the way) - you had incredible views of the surrounding mountains and valleys below

My wife is still keeping the baby asleep and warm under that jacket.

My daughter and I decided that with hills containing wildflowers, we needed to do our best to recreate scenes from The Sound of Music:

I saw a small cliff below the viewpoint, so I convinced my daughter to run down there with me.  My wife wasn't too happy that we were that close to the edge.  Especially with the "clowning around" in the third picture:

After I received a stern lecture about safety, we wandered around the summit and then took the train back down the mountain.  However, we stopped very close to the summit and decided to take an alternate way back down to the lake:  cable car:

We jumped off the train at Rigi Kaltbad and got very close to about 25 people in the car:

The cable system took us all the way down to the city of Weggis (pronounced "Vegas").  We had time to kill, while waiting for the boat, so we played around:

I would have loved to order the "Sandwich Freak Out" just to see what it was...

Upon returning to the city of Luzern, we found ourselves right smack in the middle of a huge festival - which had apparently all been built while we were gone during the day.  Before enjoying that, we had to make sure we took pictures of the famous Chapel Bridge, one of Europe's oldest wooden bridges, and a big landmark for the city of Luzern.

Then, we decided to immerse ourselves in Luzernfest (Summer Night Festival).  Basically, there was music and food/beer stands all around the lakeside. It went on until the early morning, with some bands taking the stage at around 3am!

We stopped at several stands for dinner - including this one that had Frische Brezel (pretzels and French bread) and Schnitzelbrot (chicken sandwiches?):

Then things got interesting - an ariel acrobatic team started performing over the city center:

They pulled off some amazing maneuvers and kept the thousands of people staring into the sky.  I made everyone stop at the Creperie, because I had a craving for a dinner/savory crepe. My daughter joined me:

My wife, however, enjoyed a swiss chocolate crepe.  Yeah, it probably tasted horrible, right? ; )  It looked a-m-a-z-i-n-g:

It was the perfect ending to our day.  We couldn't stay for the fireworks, as baby L had done the best she could.  We left with great memories of Luzern and the spirit of its citizens.

Tomorrow - one of the BEST days in Switzerland...