We arrived yesterday (Saturday) in Lucerne, Switzerland. From my earlier travels, I knew that Switzerland was going to be exactly as you expect: immensely beautiful, rugged, clean, and expensive. This was Garett’s first time, though, and just like me and the rest of the world, he was impressed. We have taken so many pictures. We even put ourselves in some of them. It’s impossible to take a bad picture in Switzerland.

Here are some pictures from the Museggmauer, the old wall that used to be around the city. Now it runs right through it. It’s unbelievable! How could you live in a place that’s so beautiful and ever want to go anywhere else?

Garett looks like he is sailing some sort of ship.

And today we went up to Mount Pilatus which is just outside the city. Mount Pilatus has GREAT stories about it.

The first is etymological. The name Pilatus may actually come from Pontius Pilate, whose body legendarily found its final resting place here in a lake on the mountain. Supposedly, his spirit would rise each Good Friday and kill anyone he encountered. People were banned from visiting the lake until it silted up in the 16th century. So we were safe.

Also, dragons. There have been all sorts of dragon sightings on the mountain. According to legend, many of the dragons are friendly and help people survive the winter in crevasses and the like. So cool. There are images of dragons all over the place on the mountain.

When you go, you get to take a gondola up, which is fun, and a cog train down with a 48% slope. It’s the steepest in the world and it is cray.

The gondola station is below. This was Garett’s first gondola ride we think.

And it’s hard to capture the height of the cog train, but here’s a picture of the carriage behind ours.

We climbed a few peaks while up on the mountain. I tried to whittle down the photos, but it was hard. Again, it’s impossible to take a bad picture in Switzerland. I’m going to make many of them big.

Just an aside, on the top of one of the peaks, there was a woman in an evening gown playing Despacito on the violin to a rapt audience. Her next song was, of course, the theme from Pink Panther. It was really surreal. I didn’t take a picture because then I would have had to pay her. She was doing an excellent rendition of Despacito, so she deserved compensation, but we had no change since we’d just arrived the day before.

I have a peg leg here because I was moving, but the picture is still decent.

There was also this really wonderful woman whom we asked to take our picture. She subsequently commanded us into different positions as she snapped our photos. She is responsible for the silly shots. And video. In the first one Garett is “rescuing” me, not trying to shove me down the mountain or do some Titanic king-of-the-world reenactment.

Finally, we returned via boat. We were both so tired so we didn’t take advantage of it picture-wise like we should have, but it was still beautiful.