When booking a vacation rental in Switzerland in the summer, you do not need to book as far ahead as you do for Italy. The accommodations are built for the ski season which gets more visitors than the summer season - so there usually will be something available to rent. I have booked our first 1 1/2 weeks in Switzerland.

We fly to Zurich. I am going to use www.raileurope.com to purchase Fly/Train passes for our luggage (3 or 4 pieces). It will go from the plane which arrives in Zurich to the train to Lucerne. We will just get off the plane with our carryon, then take the train direct from the airport to Lucerne (just over an hour ride). The direct train leaves once an hour. I was able to download the schedule from the Swiss Rail website to my Palm Pilot. www.rail.ch

Then we check in to a hotel in Lucerne. We usually stay in Zurich, but wanted to spend our first few days in Lucerne this time to explore a different hotel. We booked the Hotel Des Alps, a small 3 star hotel in the old part of town, right on the lake. I remember this area from a previous trip. The hotel looks right at that beautiful old bridge. Nancy, a friend of mine who lives in Florence, recommended this hotel to me and she is staying in it right now. She searched for hotels and chose this one for herself, so I figured she had already done all the work finding it and we would just stay there too. It looks nice.
http://www.desalpes-luzern.ch/

To book, I emailed them and got price and availability. They needed my credit card to confirm the reservation, so I was going to fax it to them, but the phone number was busy, so I filled out their online form. I got a confirmation for the online booking, but a few days later received an email saying they had not received my fax (even though I had emailed saying I used the online form instead of faxing). I told them I had used the online form and they checked and they did have my reservation - they had been having problems with their online booking. The conclusion for me is to always get a confirmation in email as well as with the online booking.

I had decided we would spend our first week in Engelberg, just 45 minutes drive from Lucerne and at the end of a long valley on the southern edge of Lake Lucerne. It looks like a modern mountain village (lots of hotels and restaurants) with some older parts and good hiking. Their map shows several different mountains rides and lots of trails.

I asked the tourist office to mail me their information. Then I sat down with the map of the city and the list of vacation rentals. I circled the ones with the amenities we wanted (phone, parking, 1 bedroom) and then located each one on the map. The map has a number for every vacation rental and hotel and the listing booklet gives a grid location on the map for each place, so it is easy to see where a place is.

I selected places right in the central area. In 1996 when we were booking in Davos, I thought we would want to be out of town where it would be quiet, but we were wrong. We had a nice apartment on the edge of town, but it was a 15 minute walk to the shops. The town itself was lovely and would have been quiet even if we were on the main street. So for Engelberg I select a place just a few blocks from the main street. The owners of the vacation rental also own a hotel in town. The apartment is the top floor of a chalet (probably where they live). Here is their page for the vacation rental (in German):
http://www.spannort.ch/ferienwohnung.html

The apartment is also described on the tourist office web site: www.engelberg.ch

The apartment we selected is more expensive than others, but we could book via email and we paid our deposit with a credit card. Also it is a 4 star apartment (yes, they rate their apartments with the same system as the hotels).

My next job is to find a place in Meiringen for either 1 week or 9 days. Meiringen is only an hour, maybe a bit more from Engelberg, but we want to really explore this area. The week in Engelberg we will do the hikes from town, do a day trip to Altdorf and hike there and maybe to another place on the lake. We won't need to go into Lucerne, because we will have been there at the start of the trip.

Then we will move to Meiringen or a town in that area and do the hikes there. You can actually walk in one day from Engelberg to Meiringen. From Meiringen we will probably do more exploring - Interlaken, Grindelwald, Brienz. There is a hike from Meiringen to Grindelwald that I would like to do and then take the train back. Meiringen is more centrally located and is on the main train line. Engelberg is at the end of special mountain train line.