Julie said it was a “three-person room.”  It had two twin beds pushed together with the European style comforter – no sheet, just two twin comforters. Gage’s bed was a twin, too, pushed against the giant gilt-framed wall mirror. Here are a couple of pictures (sorry for the mess – other than the first pic of my happy wife, I didn’t remember to take pics until leaving).

We had some trouble that first night with the temperature. The thermostat went down to 16.5 Celsius (about 65 Fahrenheit), but I don’t think we got below about 72f. The fan showed multiple speed settings on the thermostat, but really never changed no matter how high I set the fan or how low the temp. I mentioned it to the receptionist the next morning. In the meantime, we had to open the window to get it cool enough to sleep.  The cool breeze lulled us to sleep after the trip.

Turns out the receptionist was wrong about the carnival bands starting at 6am. They started at 5am. The bands are marching bands competing for the loudness trophy.  Five bass drums, maybe five snare drums, a bunch of tubas, trombones, and trumpets all playing at top volume, seemingly right below our second-floor window. Surprisingly, when I looked, they were across the river. Turns out sound carries very well across a still river at night. I closed the windows. Still loud. I listened to the boom, boom, boom of the drums and oom pah pa of the horns for a couple of hours, but miraculously fell back to sleep for a couple of hours. Julie and Gage had similar stories when we all finally got up around 10am.

First morning in Lucerne. For those of you coffee maker nuts, the coffee/espresso maker was [delizio], which worked great and was identical to but slightly less loud than Nespresso.

Out of our second-floor windows was a beautiful blue sky, a stunning view of the softly flowing Reuss River and Mt. Pilatus, a must-see day trip, above the rooftops. Here are a couple of pics out our windows –

The view was almost enough, but not quite enough to mask the bang, bang, bang, oom pah pa, pa pa, pomp, bang, bang, bang of the drums and horns….  Yikes. It was Monday morning before Fat Tuesday, we realized. We decided to head to the Alps.