Lucerne –Transportation Museum

7.12.2008

Today we decided to forgo the Italy trip due to the rain forecast for the entire weekend. We got on the train and headed to Luzern, about 2 ½ hours away. It is an amazingly beautiful city, with a nice mix of old and new buildings built around a lake in a valley. I dragged Kathe to the Transportation Museum, which ended up being a ton of fun and we spent 4 hours looking around.

They have a very impressive train museum, from very old trains to modern trains. We were able to see the angled trains that are used on the very steep tracks, like the trip up to Mt. Pilatus. We were going to take this train to the summit, but it was blanketed by clouds and the views would have been pretty slim.

We then moved to the Peter Sauber exhibit, which I was really excited about Peter Sauber is a Swiss race car designer, who fielded his own team for several years in Formula One. Several cars were on display, including a very recent mode. These cars have gotten extremely aerodynamic in the past few years, to an amazing extent. I drove on a very elaborate video game cockpit, which was a lot of fun. I passed Mark Weber on the Monaco track (meh).

We headed through the motorcycle and bicycle section, and then went outside where we took part in the world’s most exciting museum exhibit: we got in a head on collision. Two Mini Coopers were rammed together at 13 km/h after we were seatbelted into the cars. No helmet or liability waiver was needed. Life is exciting outside of California. The corrected video is below.


We realized that the museum is much larger than we anticipated, as we headed into the airplane, helicopter, boat, cable car, and tunnel boring sections of the museum. They also have a giant map of Switzerland that you can walk across, and zoom in on areas of interest. I found the dormitory buildings where we are staying in Lausanne. There were games for kids to play, as well as magnifying glasses and a GPS locating type device. Pretty cool stuff.

On our walk back to the main part of the city, we walked by the ampitheater and there was a very good band playing. Lots of people were on hand to listen, despite the pouring rain. We headed up to see something called the Lion, which was very beautiful, and stumbled across a glacier park. Really neat stuff, that was uncovered when a guy was building a wine cellar…now a national park. There was interesting information about global warming and carbon emissions, and then we found the hall of mirrors. The hall of mirrors was moved to this location…glaciers and a hall of mirrors seems like a great combination? This was really fun, and I did suffer some disorientation: I ran into myself once, and turned a corner to find me looking back at me, which was pretty creepy. They have a big tower we climbed up to see the city, and there were more fun mirrors.

We then headed over the covered bridge, which was really cool. We topped off the night with a really nice, but expensive, fondue dinner, and then headed home on the train.