It rained heavily last night. François is made of a high density plastic so when it rains hard it is quite loud. As I am typing this there is a thunderstorm passing buy and we can no longer here the stereo for the pounding of rain on the roof. But it is not bad for sleeping as it has a kind of white noise effect.
We were up early as the weather forecast was no rain in the morning and thunderstorms after 2pm. We didn’t want to get caught out in a thunderstorm so we were heading into town before 10am.
On the walk to the train station we passed all of the big grocery chains so I new our return to the campground would be delayed by grocery tourism. The train began by climbing up a pretty big hill than ran along a ridge into town. I expected it to drop down into the city, but instead the train station is on the highest point of the town.
As we were leaving the station Ton said to me “going down is the easy part. I responded maybe there is a bus back up. A lady passing us heard the conversation and pointed at a funicular on tracks next to us and said “Make sure you take the little train back, it is important.” We thanked her for her advice.
Swiss cities are universally clean and orderly, and feel solidly middle class. They are not the kind of cities that wow you with there architecture or atmosphere, but the kind of places that feel like they would be very comfortable to live in.
The cities don’t need to be spectacular because mother nature takes care of the spectacular with lakes and mountains and giant skies that haven’t ceased to impress us. We were drawn to the lake again to walk the waterfront and admire the views across the lake.
We wandered the town for a couple of hours and enjoyed ourselves. Tons fascination with Swiss McDonald’s led us to head there to try to get a Toblerone McFlurry, but unfortunately they are seasonal and not available today.
We did peak into the first catholic church we have seen in Switzerland. It had a lot of old frescoes that we enjoyed and an interesting design that included a wall that split the congregation of the church in half, with an immense fresco on it.
It was getting time to head back to beat the thunderstorms. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the funicular back up the hill to the train station so we had to climb back up the hill to the train.
As expected we did a little grocery tourism on the way back to the campground. I was surprised when we returned to the campground as we had wandered thru Lugano much more than we thought, to the tune of about 7 miles according to my fitbit.