Luzern - Spreuerbrücke (Mill Bridge)

Our favorite bridge is the Spreuerbrücke. This bridge, built in 1408, has paintings about the plague called "Dance of Death." If you look carefully you can find a skeleton in each painting.

Reise: Luzern

We took a trip ("reise") to Luzern and spent the day walking around town.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucerne

This is the old bahnhof arch:

The city is famous for its beautiful wooden bridges.

There is a very interesting dam that helps control the water level for surrounding towns.

Plum tart

Our grocery store sells pre-made rolled out pastry dough.

We decided to turn this into a plum cake. It was fantastic!

Edelweis -- a symbol of Switzerland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edelweiss

On our hike in Braunwald we were surprised to see Edelweiss growing in the mountains. Edelweiss literally translates from German as "nobel white." The Edelweiss we saw was along a cliff and I thought we were going to fall off looking at it.

Back down the mountain

Before making our descent back toward Braunwald, we came upon a sheep pasture. We had been hearing the bells around their necks for a long time....

One of the most exciting things about the hike were the parts of the trail that were so close to the edge of the mountain that they had wires to hold as you hiked.

We got so caught up in the hike that we lost all track of time and missed the cable car down to Braunwald. We ended up walking down, through the town. Next time we'll start out earlier--this is definitely a hike we'd like to do again.

More on Braunwald

As we walked further along the ridge way above Braunwald we realized we could walk the long way around and connect back up to the original trail we started on and catch the lower cable car down. We have never seen geology quite like this before. The path was over rock that was split and smoothed, often with moss and ferns and even trees growing out of it. It made for fun hiking.

Gumen to Braunwald continued

At the top we started on a loop hike. The area was quite rocky, much of the trail covered with loose stone. We decided to break off the trail and head up to the ridge, to Bützi. This is kind of neat because you can actually pass over the mountain and walk high along the ridge. We had to climb through lots of snow along the way, which is always a popular thing.