We said good-bye to our fair
Alruna in Basel, Switzerland (our fourth country in a week!), where the cruise-worthiness of the Rhine ends. So the river in my title here is the
Reuss, fourth-longest river in the country, and the one that flows into the gorgeous Lake Lucerne and provides wonderful riverside attractions along the way. That's what I'll show you this time, and next time I'll focus on the lake.
Viking put us on a bus in Basel, and we were ferried in comfort to Luzern and our post-cruise extension, learning some interesting stuff about Switzerland along the way. And as wonderful as the cruise was, we think we might just have saved the best for last.
Our hotel in Luzern (this is the German spelling and I'm trying to stick with that, since the city is in the mostly German-speaking region of Switzerland*) might not have been quite as swank as the one in Amsterdam, but it was very nice and in a great location. The picture below shows you what it looks like from the lake...yes, it's named the
Art Deco Hotel Montana, with no reason given for the western U.S. reference.
It was a short walk (and an even shorter tram ride) to all the attractions along the riverside. And it was in a nice neighborhood; I'll show you below the view from our room and the spectacular view from the restaurant where we got to eat our included breakfast. And, it was easy to get to a super-photogenic walkway along the lakeshore as well. (Photos from that stroll next time.) To get down to that walkway, you don't have to walk around the block, or even take a prosaic elevator. There was the cool funicular you see above on the right, instead!
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| we didn't have a lakeside view from our room, but this was nice anyway |
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| not a bad view to accompany your eggs cooked to order... |
But let's get back to that riverfront.
Practically any google image search you perform for Lucerne (or Luzern) will get you lots of professionally-framed photos of the Reuss and the famous
Kapellbrücke (or Chapel Bridge) which spans it. So rather than show you one of my attempts at this famous scene, I thought I'd share some off-to-the-side views of the iconic structure.
(You know that a landmark is the symbol of a city when you even get a cookie in its shape in your hotel room...see it at left!)
I took a picture that highlighted this tower, too...
...as well as this one from the bridge itself, looking upstream:
Looking back the other way, you can just see the bridge in the background, along with the handsome church that also dominated the view above. It's the Jesuit Church, one of two impressive houses of worship that we toured. More about the interiors in a later post.
You can see more of the bridge's span in this photo. The Reuss is a pretty wide river, this close to its mouth at the lake:
Both sides of the river are simply stuffed with attractions, like the church, and amenities, like the
fine Italian restaurant where we hazarded an indoor dining experience (we figured even if we caught covid there, it wouldn't show up on our needed-to-go-home tests, which were happening the next morning; and they were negative).
After dinner one evening, Henry and I took a stroll further upstream and discovered yet another covered bridge that afforded some good positions for photos of the narrowing, but still formidable, Reuss...
What a beautiful city this is! And at an incredible location. Next time I'll go more wide-angle for you and show you some of the surrounding scenery, in particular the spectacular lake. Here's a teaser:
*As most of you probably know, Switzerland has three well-known official languages: German, French, and Italian. It also has a fourth, that's not as well-known:
Romansch. That explains the multi-language translations of the river we cruised on in
my first post about this trip: Rhine/Rhein/Rijn/Rhin/Rain, or English/German/Dutch/French/Romansch. As a language nerd, it's not surprising I found Switzerland such an intriguing place!
