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some big bushes which we carefully we hid behind. We took our unopened tent and slept underneath it so we would not be seen and not gather any attention to ourselves. I was a bit worried because we could see a high-rise apartment and we were afraid that somebody would see us from their balcony and phone the police. The noises of dogs sniffing around did not make us feel good either.

The next morning we crossed the Reuss River with heavy backpacks and we found a campground by the Lake Lucerne called the Lido (a couple of km from the train station). The lake was not a great place to swim since there was not a nice beach but I still got soaked. People at the camping were quite friendly and we had good service. As I recall, they had good barbecue chicken one of the few things that were affordable around there.

We did enjoy going downtown and walked on the Chapel Bridge, the covered bridge built in the first half of the 14 century. Many old paintings decorated the bridge. Few years later there was a fire in a boat and the famous monument went in flames. It was rebuilt and I have not seen it since.

We loved walking around the old town and loved to look at the flower window boxes and enjoyed looking at old houses painted with Swiss scenes. It was also interesting to see the artists painting street scenes near the exit of the medieval bridge.

While we were there we rented hybrid bikes at the camping and we traveled north for a tour around the Lake Lucern. Tara, did not like the fact that our little bike trip was starting all uphill. She still remembers how sore her bum was in Holland but I encouraged her by saying this would not last very long. She wanted to quit right at the beginning.

We took a wrong turn and we ended on the Autobahn. Some people were waving and screaming. Autibahn, Autobahn, nicht. I understood that we should not be there, I did not want to be hit by a car flying at 180 km in a hour. We probably would have got a huge fine if we stayed on it.

There is not a bike trail around the lake most of the time we used village roads.

We biked towards Kussnacht, Lauerz by the beautiful Lauerzersee . We took a picture of ourselves with the bikes with Rigi in the background. We climbed a hill surrounded by cherry trees. We got a splendid picture of Schwyz and the Mythen peaks.

We reached the town of Arth and later Goldau. I took a picture of Tara by the church in Goldau.

We later took a ferry to Brunnen a troley (cogweel) to the top of the mountain. When we got out we had quite a view of the lake Lucern and of the surrounding mountains. There was also the spectacular lake Seelisberg (Seelisbergsee) on top hidden in some valley. People were camping around it. I still have not seen a better alpine camping spot.

We stopped at a store for refreshments and we made our way down the hill to Lucerne. There were very steep switchbacks, I was easily passing every car, I had to control my speed. We could have easily gone over a cliff. We were very happy that we had great brakes . It was wonderful to do so much mileage so quickly. We ended our trip a little bit tired but very happy , we had just done 80 km. That was not bad. This was easily our most scenic that we had done up to that point.