Kid day in Luzerne

The smart helpful matron of our hotel suggested we go to this park--the Lido beach on the north side of Lake Luzerne. It was kind of the opposite of "bricha amcha." Clean and lovely with very clear rules: it was verbotten to enter the pool without showering. The lake was cold but refreshing and Akiva and I swam out to a big floating raft and hung out with the big kids.


The boat ride back to the center of Luzerne at sunset was worth the wait.

Arriving in Luzerne

Here we are on the train from Zurich to Luzerne at around noon having been up since 2am. Photo taken by a nice couple from Austin who looked much less destroyed than us even though they'd just flown all the way from Texas.
Luzerne is total postcard bait. Hard to take a bad picture here.
Revived by beer and Coca Cola we went on to the loveliest lakeside park. I guess we passed some historical sights on the way but keeping the kids happy with swimming and ice cream was the order of the day.

Bricha Amcha

Well, I'm going a bit backward in time here but we just had to tell you about some of our ludicrous last days in Israel. This is a little spring fed pool across the road from an army base that we found with the help of our new friend, Fay and by cell phone, her friend Moshe Tov. Fay had never been to these pools and we were led, getting lost a few times, by several phone calls to Moshe Tov. Finally we found in the midst of an agricultural area a little grove of trees. In the middle of this grove of trees were these little concrete pools. The pools were surrounded by Israelis of all stripes, a couple of tents, some making coffee, a bunch of guys on dirt bikes--this is "amcha"("your people".) This was all accompanied by a fair amount of debris and trash and no facilities whatsoever.
As Sammy said, "This is not like our pool in West Orange."



We had a lovely shabbat dinner hosting the potter Daniel (see earlier post) and his wife Helen and Fay and Moshe Tov. On Sunday we had another crazy day driving around with Fay getting lost and finally finding a beach around sunset. We made it back to Fay's moshav at around 10pm where we all slept for a few hours until this crazy, nice woman got up at 2am to drive us to Ben Gurion airport. The glaring lights of the Duty Free store and the 30 shekel McDonald's Happy Meals (no toy, no explanation; can this be called a Happy Meal?) made sure no one was going back to sleep. So on to Switzerland.
Note guys on dirt bikes. They could not stop 20 feet away but had to roar right up to the edge of the pool.