Switzerland started with a three-country day. What the fuck, you might ask, is a three country day?

Well.

It is a day you wake up in Germany, fly to Italy, rent a Fiat 500 that reminds you of the toy cars toddlers pedal with their feet, and then drive north over several 10,000 foot passes in said toy car until the sky opens up and the earth evens out and you are suddenly surrounded by Swiss Alps – actual Alps – which for this mountain fangirl with sea-level lungs was the equivalent of meeting a god when you haven’t showered yet that day.

I was breathless with joy up there.

I have been fortunate enough to learn, in my life, from the Alaska Range, from the Sierras, from the Rockies. So I know that every mountain has its own character: each tells a different story. Each has its own trickling web of glacial runoff; each builds a collection of summer storm clouds around its head. Each accepts or rejects our antlike advances; clearing the path of June snow if it feels like it, dusting the hills with wildflowers or obscuring the path ahead, an invitation to accept that the path was always only one of countless tools we have at our disposal to figure out where we are and where we’re going.

Thank you Swiss Alps for being everything that my inner Sound of Music superfan heart could desire. For your sweeping fields of flowers, for your heart-stoppingly cold rivers. For your almost comically quaint villages, your restaurants with sunny porches, for the marmots that stood facing into the evening sun as we drove into the valley. For Toblerone.

In the mornings, we drank coffee in the rental apartment, looking at the mountains which rose on all sides, snow-capped, green, sunny. In the afternoons we pedaled our tiny car up them and burst out, walking up trails until walls of red-streaked late-season snow stopped us from going any further. We followed rivers; we dodged cows.

We did not once, in three days, guess the correct language to speak to anyone – allegedly in the German part of Switzerland, the inhabitants of Obergoms and its surrounding villages seemed to speak Italian, French, and some completely unrecognizable dialects we could not parse. The correct language when you’re a tourist, of course, is a smile and a pointed finger. In this we are becoming quite fluent.

In the evenings, we ate apricots and olives and watched the clouds around the tops of the mountains glow pink and red in the sunset. On the last night, the full moon watched us sleep.