As today is our last day in Lucerne we decided to go up the funicular railway to the hotel that we could see from the towers as it has a fantastic view of the city. You push a button to call the railway then head off up to the top. Unfortunately when you get up there the best views are either from the terrace of the hotel or from the modern art sculpture park, we opted for the view from the latter which at least let us walk around and have a look. Once we had marvelled at how much we could see we decided to go to the Richard Wagner museum which is along the lake, we could have taken the funicular back down but we decided to walk as there is a public park for half of the way down then we crossed the railway with a fantastic view of Mount Pilates that we went up yesterday before quite a long walk along the road to the lake. We did get to look at all the houses as we were walking along then we cut into another park which is where Wagners house is. He lived in Luzern for six years and received many guests including King Ludwig II, Franz Liszt and the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche. Although not much furniture remains in the villas they do have his grand piano apparently he only planned to stay for a year, the house was actually quite small and Cosima (his wife) and her five children lived on the first floor while guests stayed on the second floor – which we couldn’t visit and there was an annex that housed the kitchen, laundry and stables and a farmhouse 200m further inland housed the nanny, cook and farmhands. After walking round the house and listening to some of his music we walked back to Luzern and arrived just in time to get on the lake cruise. This was an hour and took us to the end of the Luzern finger of the lake. The lake is massive and it takes about five hours to go to the end so we only did a small portion of it but it was really nice as we had a commentary and therefore found out about some of the houses on the lake. It was a really nice way to spend an hour and we got seats on the back so it wasn’t too windy or too hot. When we docked it was about 2pm so we went off in search of something to eat after which I dragged Chris into Bucherer’s which is a shop that stocks all the main brands of Swiss watches,it was fascinating to see so many in one place although we were probably the only Europeans in the whole shop, it is very obvious that their target is the Asian market as everyone in there was Asian and they were all there to buy rather than look! After wondering around all three floors we escaped then had a walk around the old town again before heading back to the apartment to relax and check what time we need to leave to fly back tomorrow.
