Today we skirted five lakes in this area of Switzerland – the Thunersee, Brienzersee, Lungerersee, Samersee, and Lucerne Nidwalden) – and included a number of mountain passes. All up we traveled a bit over 250km for the day. The second graph is the altitude changes over our day to show a couple of the bigger passes.

After heading out at 8:30am it was a lovely cool morning as we headed from Thun and around the lake at Thun and onto the lake at Brienz.

From here we started to climb through a number of passes, including the Brünig pass – where we parked and looked down on the Sarnersee which is where we are going to have a picnic lunch. We also stopped in and grabbed some locally produced cheese and sausage from a farmer’s stall on the side of the road.

Then onto the Glaubenbielen pass to get to our lunch destination. This was quite a narrow and technical road so lane position is very critical. But great fun.!

After lunch we made our way to Hergiswill to a glass blowing factory with a long history in making glass products. Quite different to that at Murano. Certainly worth a visit if you’re in the area.

From here it was onto Lucerne which was established in 750AD and had a number of buildings in the older area dating back to the 1500’s. Overall its a nice place … but still a city and I’d much rather be out in the mountains.

By now it was getting quite warm wandering around town at 39 degrees C at 4pm so we escaped to get some air moving over us and headed back to Thun with a short detour to the Kambley biscuit factory which had lots of yummy things to test.

---

Tomorrow we pack our bags as we are riding through Switzerland and into Austria.