Musings on Switzerland
Have you ever been asked what your favorite vacation spot in the world is? A place where, if granted infinite time & money, you could move to and imagine yourself to be eternally happy? Typical answers may include a Caribbean or Mediterranean beach. Possibly the cosmopolitan and cultural joys of Paris or the Loire Valley. But for me? Ever since I visited it as a wee lad, my thoughts always drift to the mountains and waterfalls of Switzerland.
Thus it was with some trepidation on my part that we departed from our Versailles masquerade party on a train heading directly into the Swiss Alps. This isn’t the first time I’ve had the feeling on this trip: a fear that my expectations or nostalgia would conflict directly with the reality of the present. It somehow felt more acute this time. After all, when I was a kid traipsing merrily around the Schilthorn, I had not yet experienced the grandeur of New Zealand and Scottish Highlands. Would this measure up? Or would it be like returning to a book you once loved as a child that is mediocre when revisited decades later?
The short answer to all this is that, at least for me, geographical wonders almost never cease to amaze. We rolled into Interlaken with our eyes glued to the windows, joking that the sights before our eyes had to be part of a titanic Romanticist painting. Glacial blue water ran in rivers and waterfalls around every corner. We walked to our Unterseen Airbnb through a quiet and immaculately clean part of the Swiss town. The radiance of sunset cast the vast mountains overhead in an even more unbelievable light. From our very backyard we could sit and watch the moon, remarkably clear and bright, pierce through misty clouds nestled around the throat of the Jungfraujoch, heralded as the Top of Europe itself.
That last paragraph probably sounds pretty stupid over-the-top, but visiting Switzerland is pretty much exactly like that. You feel like you’re in some sort of impossibly beautiful magical Disney kingdom that should not exist in the real world. While going for a walk in some random direction, you can easily find some new waterfall bubbling out of cliff rock or some base jumper landing in a pasture nearby. You go far enough down a path and encounter yellow grass swimming in the breeze as the trees at a forest’s edge wave to you as if in greeting. You pop up a funicular to the Niederhorn, expecting it to simply be a warm-up view for a larger trip the next day, and end up at a loss for words. Ibexes come within a few feet of you as you walk a trail all to yourself, the eternal quiet of the elevation your only companion as you look down on bright green ridges, valleys, and mountains all around you.
Just look at me gush about Switzerland. It’s absurd! All that I describe is just the Interlaken stuff too. Lucerne was more of this, but with wooden bridges and wonderfully painted buildings without end. A really special place; we totally abandoned plans to see Mount Pilatus in favor of more time in this uniquely Swiss-Italian feeling city. Every inch of Switzerland that we saw was an inch I’d have to recommend. Beauty without end.
I have to stop myself here or risk rambling on for pages more. Make sure to check in tomorrow for an update on how our journey went as we passed from Lucerne to Salzburg and Vienna!
