Lake Lucerne, and Pilatus mountain

On Friday 8/3 we drove through Lucerne to our hotel in Emmetten, a small town overlooking Lake Lucerne. 

Sunset from our hotel restaurant overlooking Lake Lucerne

The hotel, like most in Switzerland, has no A/C, so our room is sweltering as daytime temps top 90°.  The only ventilation is the balcony door.  No screens.. .so the mosquitos come in.   A less than ideal situation.  There are essentially 2 things to do here :

1. Take a cable car up one of the mountains that overlook the lake
2. Go jump in the lake to cool off

We did some of each.  The high point (literally) of our stay here was the excursion to Mount Pilatus on Saturday.
There are 2 ways (other than hiking) to ascend to the top:

1. Cog Railway up the eastern face.  It's was built in 1890, and is still the steepest cog railway in the world, with a peak gradient of 48°.  It still uses the original track, although the cars were upgraded in the 1930's when the line was electrified.   This is how we went up and down.
2. A cable car from near Lucern ascends the North face.

In the cog railway ascending to the top of Pilatus

The views from the top of the mountain are nothing less than spectacular.  There are lots of hiking trails and even playgrounds for children.  We did what we do best... walked around and then had an excellent lunch at Hotel Pilatus-Kulm. 

Cog railway base station

It was nice and cool up top, with some breeze, but stinking hot at the base... so we found an area along Lake Lucern that we could swim from (with very slippery concrete at the water's edge), and spent the rest of the day there.
On Sunday morning, we took the gondola from Emmetten to Stockhütte.  At first we were going to go up to Niederbauen, where the hang gliders launch from, but the line was too long, so we went for the less youthful option.  The hang gliders land about 300m from our hotel:

After lunch and a short hike around the top of the mountain, we returned to the swimming hole we had found the day before, and spent the rest of the day there.