"We Have to See the Lion!"

Following a dumping of stuff off at the hotel, we set off for “the lion.”  I wasn’t exactly sure what my mom was talking about, and I’m usually the “logistics coordinator” of these trips.  I study up on the local things to do, places to eat and must sees as advised by the likes of Rick Steves, DK and Lonely Planet.  Sidenote: I LOVE travel guides.  But more than travel guides themselves, I love UP TO DATE ones.  So, even though my mother had the DK guide to Switzerland from a time long ago when she dreamed of travel here, I had the 2013 version.  You never know what mountain top has gone by the wayside due to avalanche, or what tavern has closed and/or changed names as the result of recession... Admittedly, much of these guides do not change, but I like to keep the most recent one available.  It kills me every time my mom mentions the Fodor’s travel guide “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day.”  First of all, I couldn’t even do Burnsville on 5 Dollars a day, let alone Europe.  Ultimately, the mention of this book brings her to stories of “well, when I was here last” Pre-World War II... or at least Pre-Vatican II.  Things have changed mom, and so have the travel guides.  

At any rate, I had no idea what “the lion” was, but I found us a route via the old medieval wall that surrounded the city.  Not thrilled about more up and down, we trekked up a short hill to the wall and walked along.  My dad and I ventured up one of the towers (my dad, who hates heights, and would have been just as satisfied talking to the llamas in the field down below, went up into the tower with me.  You got another panoramic view of Luzerne - a beautiful city.  

We walked along the wall for a while longer, and weaved through the streets to ‘the lion.’  It was an interesting carving in the side of a hill - which Mark Twain described “The Lion of Lucerne would be impressive anywhere, but nowhere so impressive as where he is.”  Many have likened it to the lion in the Narnia books - that I can’t remember the name of right now, but you know what I mean.  

It was a nice, serene place, the entryway protected by Mormons trying to convert the Chinese entering, and a small black cat that roamed as if he owned the place.  The calm waters were not something my mom remembered from her 50 B.C. trip here, but Twain referenced it - so it must have been here all those years ago.  

We wandered through the shopping streets on our way back to the hotel, stopping for some authentic Swiss food - at McDonalds.  Never before had a McDonalds let us down so hard - to the tune of $40 on top of it.  We had two chicken wraps and I ordered a cheeseburger.  You can NEVER go wrong with a McD’s cheeseburger.  But man were those chicken wraps a bust.  Oh well.  At least we didn’t leave the McDonalds trying to talk our way out of a fixed price meal :)

And then this happened:

What is this sign trying to tell us?