Day 15: Luzern to Solothurn

We took our time waking up today. Breakfast was eaten around 8:30 and finished by 9:00. We packed up and checked out by 10:00. Fortunately, it was not raining on our walk to the train station; Mary had packed her raincoat near the bottom of her bag!

As we arrived outside of the train station we took a detour and took an image of the Luzern wooden bridge from a different angle.

We caught the train at 10:05. When our tickets were checked the ticket checker wanted to know where we were going. We found this question unusual, it had not been asked before. We told him we were travelling to Olten for a transfer to Solothurn and he said ok. They must have been taking a survey of some kind?

Here is an image of the Swiss countryside taken while on the train:

The transfer went well and we arrived in Solothurn on time. The train station was a short walk from the old town, where our hostel is located. We arrived within 10 minutes of leaving the station. Inside the reception area there were chairs and tables. We took this opportunity to eat lunch: pears, bread, tomato, and lettuce. 

When we were done we got our bags locked up in the pacsafes and locked them to a interior steel support.

We set off to explore the old town for the next few hours; we needed to wait for reception to open at 4:30pm. On our journey through the old town we saw many sights: fountains, old walls, old town roads, and so on.

Here is an image of one of the fountains:

Here is an image of bear taking a rest while climbing a wall and looking cool:

Here is an image of the main cathedral; it is Sunday so we did not try to go in:

On our walk we also stopped off at a few museums. Apparently it is a special day for museums, they were all free. They would have been free with our swiss passes anyway, but it was nice to just wonder in and not go through the formalities of getting a ticket.

We went to the Kunstmuseum that had a lot of Swiss art. There was only one or two artists that we knew. 

Most of the art was reasonable, not contemporary. The museum also had a large collection of 15^th and 16^th century artwork. One of the pieces was the Solothurn Madonna.

Another museum that we went to was the Nature Museum. As we entered one staff heard us speaking English and tried to say that it was only in German, maybe. We were very confused by the broadside. Regardless, the museum had the usual nature museum exhibits and we did not really need English.

One exhibit that we thought was very cool was the luminescent rocks showcase. Jeff managed to take an image a rock in the dark. The exposure time was long, so the image is very blurry. Sorry. Here it is:

Someone who knows more about rocks can tell us exactly what it is, maybe? We missed the name.

After the Nature Museum we went to the old armoury. Mary did not enjoy this much, but Jeff thought it was alright. We visited three floors while we were there. The first floor had cannons from the 19^th to mid-20^th century. The second floor had weapons, mostly rifles and swords. The third floor was full of old amour.

By the time we were done it was getting close to 4pm, so we walked back to the hostel. Once we got back we had a 15 minute wait before check-in. After check-in we got up to our room and relaxed a little before heading out to dinner.

We did lots of research on dinner and found out that the best place to go was closed. Tomorrow we are going to go out for traditional Swiss food at this place. The second runner up was an Italian place. We ordered two salads, and a pizza to split. The pizza was huge and had a very thin crust. It was a “Pizza Laura”: sun dried tomato, pepper, chicken, onion. Mary picked the onion off as usual. We had water to drink. Unfortunately, the waiter asked Jeff what we wanted to drink and he asked Mary what she would like. Mary automatically said water. We had completely forgotten that we were in Europe and that water comes from a bottle. For the price of the water we could have gotten 500ml of beer. Overall the meal was delicious we would go there again if we could.

After dinner it started to rain again. We spent the evening at the hostel reading our books and attempting to plan for tomorrow. We both hope to go on some form of hike, maybe.