Switzerland! Day 1-3 (part 1)

Switzerland--Lucerne

May 2008

We took a ride up the side of a mountain near our hotel. This is actually a skiing gondola thing but they let us use it to see the Swiss Alps. It was so fun!

The view from the top of the mountain. This looks just like something from the story "Heidi." Love the cows with real cow bells and the Alp-ee look to everything.
This is "our" group! The fun, no drama Nebraska-Utah group. Dickie and Ross are on the far right. Dickie is wearing the yellow jacket and Ross is next to her wearing the "Utes" hat. Love it. Daren and I are in the back, kind of hiding from it all. This was taken at the famous "Lowenbrau" monument in Lucerne. --Notice the "Lion" carved into the side of the wall.

BEGINNING OF THE SAGA!

I'll start at the beginning and will move as quickly through our 13 day adventure as I can. It was a fabulous time! I loved traveling with Daren and also with my best-test friend, Dixine and her husband, Ross. We had a ball!

A little background. Daren and I had really hoped to make this trip be all people from Nebraska. We tried for nine months but could only get 16 people to sign up for this trip. The company we did our tour with combined us with two other groups to make a nice group of 45. OK--It's the other two groups that made this trip so interesting. One group of six were high school students from Tennessee and the other group of 30 were middle school/high schoolers from Alabama. CAN YOU JUST SAY DRAMA? I have never experienced so much drama as I did in those 11 days traveling with those two groups. Our little group from Nebraska/Utah was fabulous! We could easily travel again together!


We landed in Zurich, Switzerland around 7:30 AM. It was really 11:30 PM the day before, but with some Tynenol PM and 8 hours of sleep on the airplane we were ready start our tour of Switzerland. We were minus a cellphone but other than that we were good to go. THAT'S RIGHT I LOST MY CELLPHONE SOMEWHERE BETWEEN NEW YORK CITY AND ZURICH!
Boo-hoo! I had no way to text anyone! I was felt totally lost! It turned out to be a blessing in disguise!


Switzerland feels like home to me. They speak German and it is so clean there. Life is much like I remembered it from my mission to Northern Germany. FUN! Daren always gets a kick out of the fact that I will pretty much start a conversation with anyone and hope that he will step in with the German words that I have forgotten. This is my second time to Lucerne and we actually stayed about a half hour outside of Lucerne--up the side of a beautiful mountain. There were cows with cowbells to wake us up every morning; beautiful Swiss chalets; lovely gardens and a great old cemetery and parish.

TOILETS! TOILETS! TOILETS!

This could be a post of it's own. Toilets, toilets, toilets! I really can't say enough about some of the bathrooms we used over our 13 day stay in Europe. First of all, toilets are not free! Every time you need to go potty it costs about 50 cents. Yes, that is right...it costs to go pee-pee! Dickie and I figure we spent about $40.00 going pottie. EEK! The picture above is one of the toilets I had the "privilege" of using. Yes, you are seeing correctly--this potty is flat to the ground. It was the worst. At least it was clean. And most of all, I got to use as much toilet paper as I wanted. Some toilets were manned by people who "doled" out our quota of toilet paper. Like two little squares. It was the worst!