A Rainy Day in Switzerland

 

Last week I left you in Freiburg which is very close to the Swiss border. Switzerland was our next destination. If you happen to have paid for a vignette - the toll for Swiss highways - you can take the highway and reach your destination pretty quickly. After all, Switzerland is a small country that has four main linguistic and cultural regions: German, French, Italian and Romansh. However, the price for this vignette is pretty steep considering that we were only spending two days there (Switzerland is a very expensive country) and therefore , we decided to drive along the smaller roads. It's a decision that we didn't regret, even though our progress was relatively slow. There are a lot of mountains to cross - but that was on the second day and will be dealt with in a seperate post.

We have been to most of Switzerland before, but we never had visited Luzern (Lucerne), so this was the place we reached in the early afternoon. Luzern  is located on the shores of Vierwaldstättersee (Lake Lucerne) and its outflow, the River Reuss. Its main landmark is the Kapellbrücke (Chapel Bridge), a covered wooden footbridge with its octagonal Wasserturm (water tower in the sense of a tower standing in the water). The bridge was first erected in the 14th century (c 1365) and spans the river Reuss. 

It was dry when we arrived, but we did see some darker clouds gathering at the horizon. We decided to first cross over the modern footbridge (top photo) to the other side and walk back via Kapellbrücke and taking our sweet time with it. As it turned out, we pretty much hadn't a choice once we reached the covered bridge.

The clouds and the sky became dramatically darker and more ominous from minute to minute.

The first drops started to fall when we had just reached the bridge - we were lucky. We walked along the bridge, enjoying the still nice views. I loved the flowers at the side of the bridge.

The view through the sides to the shores with their old city buildings was quite impressive.

The Kapellbrücke (and two other wooden bridges in Lucerne) features painted interior triangular frames. This is unique since none of the other European wooden footbridges has this feature. The paintings date back to the 17th century and depict events from Luzern's history and were executed by local painter Hans Heinrich Wägmann. Originally, there were 158 paintings, but the majority were destroyed in a fire in 1993. Today. there are only 30 paintings that were fully restored (of the 47 that were collected after the fire).

Then the thunderstorm started.

Within seconds the bridge was wet on the inside, the rain came in from all sides and on top there was thunder and lightning. I'm not sure how sensible it was to stay on a wooden bridge in the middle of a river during the thunderstorm, but we didn't have much choice - we were stuck. I have to admit that it was quite exciting.

The thunder and lightning didn't last long. I tried to make a short video of the relentless rain. Turn up the sound.

After we were finally able to leave the bridge without getting completely soaked, we drove along the Vierwalstättersee to Buochs. Our hotel was right on the lake and if the weather would have been better, we would have had a great view of the mountains.

Instead we had low hanging clouds - they looked quite dramatic and I loved this moody atmosphere.

We had a delicious dinner in the restaurant of the hotel. I had filets of whitefish from the Vierwaldstätersee which is called "Felchen" (I couldn't find a proper translation, some call it a Lake Constance whitefish). They served Bavarian beer, so I had a dark Weißbier from the Erdinger brewery which happens to be one of my favorite Bavarian beers. This, of course, is for T Tuesday where I greet Elizabeth and Bleubeard with a cheerful "Prost" (German "cheers").