Swiss Cities: Luzern and Zurich

The last stops on our highlights tour of Switzerland were Luzern and Zurich. At this point, I was reluctant to leave the mountains. I should have known, but I loved the mountains the best. There was so much more hiking left to do! Well, I was the one who insisted on seeing Luzern and Zurich so we left the mountains and headed for Luzern.

It was really hot in Luzern and Zurich (30˚C) and there really isn't air conditioning in most buildings. It wasn't quite as pleasant walking around the old towns as we would have liked and with a two year old it is more difficult to sit at a cafe and enjoy a cold beer. Luzern does have an interesting old city and great shopping. We were a little annoyed by the large tour groups of Germans and Chinese that were always in the way. I walked to the iconic weeping lion memorial while Sam and Inga napped. It is a nice memorial and surprisingly quiet given the shopping mall and Swiss-Chinese (no joke) shops across the street.

Lowenplatz memorial carved into the rock face.

One of many fountains in old Luzern

Kapelbruche in Luzern (our hotel is on the left)

The best attraction in Luzern is the Swiss Transportation Museum. This is the only museum we visited on our trip and it was well worth it. It is a great museum for children; there are lots of hands-on activities. The courtyard of the museum has gravel pits with tricycle front loaders for building roads and a miniature port where you can offload container ships and load onto delivery trucks. There were also trains, lots of trains. Where we should have gone after the museum was to the Lido Luzern, which is a water park on the lake. We walked by it on our way back from the museum and Inga really wanted to go swimming, but we didn't have our swim suits with us.

One of the cutters used to make train tunnels

Train snow plow

Car inventory with automatic lift mechanism

Hands-on road building exhibit i.e. lots of rocks and tricycle front-end loaders.

We had one day in Zurich before our flight home the next morning. We hadn't done much research so we just walked around old town. Again, it was super hot and there was no air conditioning. We tried to find a playground, but didn't have any luck. There is really amazing shopping in Zurich especially if you have serious cash to spend. We didn't so we mostly window shopped and bought ice cream instead.

Street in old Zurich

Grossmunster

Street in old Zurich shopping district

Sushi tram! You eat sushi while driving around Zurich.

Our flight home was delayed several hours. We had gotten up really early in the morning to get to the airport. By about 11am, Inga was so tired she just fell asleep in Daddy's arms while we drank coffee and ate more chocolate croissants.

A very tired girl ready to go home