Earlier in the trip I was complaining about having to pay €48 for an annual vignette for Switzerland. I felt like there should have been a shorter term vignette available. But after spending a few days transiting the excellent highways here I have changed my tune and now feel €48 is a good deal. Our travels in Switzerland have not been the most efficient. If you look at a map you will see what I mean, but a combination of a small country and good roads has made our spur of the moment routing acceptable.
Our destination today was Lucerne which is about 200 kilometers from Lusanne nearly across Switzerland. The drive involved doubling back by Berne and going almost to Zurich before heading south to Lucerne. But the roads are really good in Switzerland and surprisingly flat given the mountains because of all of the tunnels and elevated stretches of roads.
After we settled in at the campground we took the advice of the check in person and walked the lake front trail to the town. It is a nice walk, and as the weather is good a lot of the citizens of Lucerne were out there with us.
As we were passing by a really posh hotel we saw a couple of sculptures that caught our eye. We had a running joke in Lusanne about the ugly sculptures throughout the city, but these were very interesting and really appealed to us.
The statues from 50 feet away or so looked like normal stone or metal figures. But as you got closer they changed look.
As you get close to the system you see that it is not a single block of metal but hundreds of thin pieces of metal arranged to give form to the statue.
This was one of the most interesting pieces of art we have seen in a while. We looked at the biography of the artist and his name is Juliene Voss-Andreae who is originally from Hamburg Germany but now resides in Portland Oregon. We have never seen any of his art or heard of him in Portland. We are glad we traveled to Lucerne to find a really interesting artist from our hometown!
One of the advantages that Swiss cities have over most of Europe as they missed all of the major wars for the last two hundred years so a lot of buildings have survived in their original form. Lucerne has an old wooden bridge that survived intact. Unfortunately it caught fire in 1993 and about 60% of it burned down, but they were able to rebuild it pretty quickly. We were going to walk across it but it was teeming so we decided to leave it for tomorrow.
Our final stop for the day was the Lions Monument. The Swiss have not been involved in any major wars since the 1600’s, but apparently they had a reputation as fighters in the 1700’s and Swiss mercenaries were in high demand. The Pope still has his Swiss guard in the Vatican. Louis XVI of Versailles fame also had a personal guard of Swiss mercenaries. When the mob came to seize him the Swiss guard fought to the last man to defend him. Unfortunately for Louis they were overpowered and the rest is history. The Lions monument commemorates their bravery and loyalty.
As we were walking to the bus stop to head back to the camp we came across a nice church that was on Tons list. We swung in for some photos, but our plan is to head back into town either tomorrow or the day after depending on whose weather app is right. Ton uses one weather app for forecasts and I use a different one. They usually agree, but for tomorrow they completely disagree, Tons says it is going to be mostly cloudy with some sun, mine says there is a 98% chance of rain all day. We will find out who is right in the morning.