Rest Day in Luzern

We didn't have a schedule today - so we slept in.  When I say slept in, it was more of a lie in.  We got up at 9am and headed down to breakfast which was the usual array of cold cuts, bread etc, but Matt was disappointed not to find any little pastries - thinking they probably all went a little earlier.  Anyway it was nice not to be in a rush!

It was raining this morning and the forecast was for rain all morning.  Most of the activities to do around Luzern involve either going up high in a gondola / railway or being on the lake.  We couldn't see the mountains so there was no point going up high and we spent quite a few hours on the lake yesterday!  There is a transport museum here, but it is very expensive, and reviews weren't great - it includes a planetarium and a chocolate museum, neither of which we wanted / needed to do and made us wonder if the transport part of it was really up to anything.

After our experience of the pool in St Moritz, we looked for something similar in Luzern and found one.  After putting the options to Tom, he plumped for the pool, so we packed our cosies and the hotel hand towels and got the bus over (oh, think I have forgotten to mention that every time you enter a town / city in Switzerland, the hotel gives you a card which gives you free access to public transport.  It is fantastic, means we don't have to work out the local system and can just hop on / off as we please if we get tired.  Seeing as the Bahnhofs in each town are the centre of each transport system, each bus stops at them which means we can't really get lost - such a great system (however, we have also had to pay tourist tax at every hotel - so they are getting our money anyway!))

We got to the swimming pool - was CHF29.50 for the 3 of us, which we thought really reasonable (for Switzerland!).  It wasn't as good as St Moritz, but it was good none-the-less.  There was a big pool which was set up for lane swimming, a deep pool with two spring boards and a 5 meter diving platform, a curly wurly slide,  a warmer pool with bubbles and massaging spouts, a warmer pool with an adjustable floor mainly for children learning to swim and a children's pool with spouts of water, and a tiny slide.  All immaculately clean and being continuously cleaned.  We had a great time, did a bit of everything and a lot of sliding on the slides.  We had the place more or less to ourselves (the schools have gone back here) which was ace.  At one point we had exclusive use of the junior swimming pool with the floor lowered so we could swim well in it and were playing racing games: Tom won them all of course! We also had a number of goes on the spring boards - Tom did both levels and also jumped from the 5 meter high platform which neither of us were up for!  Anyway it was a great way to spend a grey rainy morning.

Around 1pm the pool started to fill up with school groups, so we left.  Downstairs was a Migros, so we bought our lunch there: tuna sandwich for Matt, a chunk of apple pie for me and a donut in the shape of a pretzel for Tom!  We then got the bus back to the centre, then another one to the hotel, dropped off our wet things in the room and as it was looking a lot nicer, we went for a walk into the old town.  The town has ancient crenelated walls with tall towers dotted along it.  We found one and then discovered you could go inside the towers and walk along the walls...for...free!  Yay, so we did.  It wasn't that far to walk and very pleasant.  We even discovered a field with some alpacas and some highland coos in it.  Matt was so excited when he saw the sign for the Highland Coos, that he pointed it out to me - unbeknown to him, the fence it was attached to was electrified and as the sign was metal that meant he got a shock!  Ouch!  Those Highland coos are trouble aren't they?

We walked back to the hotel and had a chillax in the room before heading out for tea.  We did a recce on the computer of possible places to go (we are down to our last CHF100 so needed to make sure we didn't go over!) We found a place which was in the station, but when we got there, we discovered it was a take away - there were no seats to eat, you had to eat standing up.  Not a nice relaxing night out, so we carried on outside and ended up in all of things an Irish pub!  Oh hum, never mind, at least the prices were what we needed.  Matt had a burger and Tom and I had tacos and it was all well cooked.  We then went for an amble in the old town - it is another very handsome town, loads of the buildings in the old town have old historic paintings on them, lots of gold guilding, plenty of money spent on making sure they look good.

Then back to the hotel for a last pack and sleep.  Got to be up early tomorrow! 

Oh, almost forgot, had a lovely Whats App video call with Mum for her birthday - finally they are set up on Whats App, hoping we are able to stay in touch better now with photo sharing etc etc.