The Day of Beinwil Am See Adventures

It’s adventure day in Switzerland!  That’s what we kept telling the kids, anyway. Bob and Griffin went into Lucern to pick up a Swiss train station clock souvenir while the other six of us had decided to take a break from the trains and stay near our AirBnB.  

The remaining six adventurers left the house with only the slightest idea where we might want to go and absolutely no idea how we might get there.  Brianna read that Lake Halwilersee, the huge lake that our AirBnB looks out on, has a walking/biking path that wraps all the way around it.  She also read that there was a moted sort of castle at the other end of the lake.  The only way we could have been further away from that castle would have been if six of us walked backwards out the front door and up the driveway.  So yeah, we wanted to get to the castle, I just didn’t think it would be possible.  No harm in trying, right?

Riddle number one of our journey was the basic logistical question of, “how do we get from the house down to the lake path?” It was a bit frustrating to see the walking path just a couple hundred yards out our back window yet be so far away from actually walking on it.  The AirBnB owner told us point blank that the Swiss do not take kindly to other people walking on their land and that walking through the field behind the house was not an option.  When asked how we should get down to the path, the answer we received was less than clear, “walk up the driveway and make a turn.  Head down the path to the lake.” Not helpful.  The only paths we saw were driveways and roads.

When all you have to go on is a set of completely useless directions, the only thing left to do is wing the shit out of it.  By our calculations, if we started walking down a road that pointed in the general direction of the lake, we might eventually get there?  What we were going to do once we arrived, other than walk, we had no idea.

30 minutes of wandering a right turn down some roads with no sidewalks, left down a cement trail through someone’s yard (it seemed more legit than walking through grass), and a few other turns, we eventually arrived at the lake.  It wasn’t the walking/biking trail that we were expecting, but there was a fancy restaurant, which felt like a win.  The baby wanted to eat, we wanted to eat, and our non-existent schedule to nowhere wasn’t pressing us into any kind of a hurry.

We sat at the fancy restaurant with our big family and made a fun mess of their beautiful table clothes.  I’m not even talking about the kids, I was probably the messiest of the bunch.  My brain doesn’t understand the functional need for both a butter knife and a steak knife.  I’m skilled enough to butter bread with the same knife I use to cut into meat.  Why not give us a third knife for cutting through the rolls? A butter knife isn’t sharp enough and a steak knife shreds it like a piece of meat, crumbs exploding everywhere.

My messy eating aside, the restaurant stop did allow us time to discover a ferry boat that appeared to be stopping at a nearby dock every 15 minutes or so.  A quick look at the boat map and we found ourselves believing that this moted castle idea might actually happen… and then it did!  Hallwyl Castle was pretty cool, just not cool enough for us to pay for admission.  In this case, as with so many others, it was about the adventure.

Tomorrow, we say, “see you in Germany” to Bob and Rachel.  Here we come, Brugge!  First train leaves at 0540 😮

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