Outside Lucerne, Lucerne

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to see a nice mountain-place I recommend you to go to Engelberg from where you can go to Mt.titlis, in winter you can go skiing (alpin and nordic way) and in summer hiking/walking and cycling
Engelberg: the largest and - the most beautiful as we are convinced - winter sport area in the centre of Switzerland. Get your skates respectively your skis or your board on and enjoy 82 kilometres of ski runs. You will never be bored as you can also join various activities off the slopes. You surely won't regret spending your holidays here!

Going up/down the Mt. Titlis via the cable car, you can enjoy magnificent views of the mountains and villages. Thus, you can take a picture from there. In autumn, the view is also a contrast of what is up the Mt. Titlis (below is full of greenery, up is full of snow).

Near the town of Engelberg, you can ascend a cable car going to Mt. Titlis. Going further up, you will need to ride another 2 cable cars, one of which is rotating (it is actually rotating from the inside, through the floor). Up the mountain, you can enjoy the view of the Swiss Alps and play in the snowfields. You can also bring a bottle of wine / champagne and share it / drink it from there.

I know it is very expensive to go up to Pilatus. But in my opinion it is worth every Franc. Take both ways (different way up and down) and you will experience two nice trips.

Also plan to spend enough time up there, to make some small hikes. It is beautifull!

The Gruyère Lake is another nice place to go around Lucerne,specially if you like water sports or see some awesome views.Here you will find a few small hotels and restaurants,and is a nice place to feel relaxed and being in the nature.Unfortunatelly my bus stoped here for a very short time,but we were lucky enough because it was at sunset time,so I got a few nice sunset photos that I'll place in a separate page very soon.Anyway is a beautiful lake!.

It was amazing to be at the top of the mountain. We took the gondola ride up. We had to make a couple of stops along the way to change gondolas. We were also able to ride the RotAir which is a large gondola that holds several people and it rotates as you go up the mountain so you get different views. It was the first of its kind, but now there are a few others in the world. It's amazing how hot & summery it was at the bottom of the mountain, and how cold it was at the top. One of my friends was wearing sandals because she didn't expect us to be going to the top of the mountain, so we all rented snow shoes when we got up there. They also have many activities for you to do once you get up there. Unfortunately since we got started so late everything was closing when we got up there. It took us 4 hours to get up there since we took the ferry & the train. We could've gone on some intertubing course. It looked fun in the brochures. Instead we just had a snowball fight. It was still fun.

This is what we saw when we got off the ferry. We were then supposed to find the train to take us the rest of the way to the mountain. It wasn't too hard to find. There were signs posted from the time we got off the ferry until we arrived at the train station pointing us towards the station.

Our hotel was about 45 minutes out of Lucerne. On the way there in our bus we noticed the beautiful mountain scenery and saw that train tracks were often close to the road.
Once at our hotel in Engelberg, we note the railway tracks end just in the back of our hotel. Having seen the scenery from the bus, on the next day we decided to take the train from Lucerne to Engelberg. What a joy. For part of the trip the train becomes a cog railroad because of the steep hills.
This is something to be done.

Visit the Kanton Obwalden and the Lungerer See! The big alps are looking over the smaller mountains and make it an impressive view!
The Lungerer Lake lies in a natural dam, build in the last ice period......
My friend had to make some studies for the earthquake research in Switzerland...Quite interesting! You can walk around the lake!

One last glimpse of Mt Titlis in the background. That's me (still at the village of Engelberg) looking real happy after a day of FUN up on the mountain. Try and refrain from buying anything here. Everything is so darn expensive! I accidentally dropped one of my cameras at Mt Titlis and the film was exposed in the process. Had to buy a new Kodak film to replace the spoilt one. Guess how much it costs me to buy a Kodak ASA200 film with 12 exposures? If my memory didn't fail me, I think I was charged 16 Swiss Francs for it!! Yes, it's ridiculous. And if I had a choice, I wouldn't have bought it. Souvenirs and postcards here are also exhorbitantly priced.