“My dog was a–she came from a… how you call it… death station?” Jakob1 stood in the hallway of our Airbnb, telling me about the German Shepherd he and his wife had rescued. He was a compact man in his early sixties with a head of thick, gray curls, a tidy beard, and sparkling eyes the color of the sky. I nodded, but barely, because the ground under my feet still felt too rocky after hours of driving along twisty mountain roads, and any vigorous movement might very well knock me over. Kill shelter, I translated in my mind. “She had puppies but not with her. We could see because she had… ah…” Here Jakob pinched the air just above his chest between his thumb and forefinger. “How to say? For baby dogs to eat?” He looked directly at me as if certain I, especially, would know what he meant.
I did! He was trying to tell me that they knew his dog had puppies because of her prominent nipples. Or breasts. Or teats. Any of those terms would have worked. But I stayed quiet because I didn’t still didn’t trust my stomach to hold its contents if I opened my mouth. Also, what was the protocol for using a word like “nipple” with a brand new acquaintance if my health was not involved? My brain was too fuzzy and carsick to know.
We had met Jakob in the parking lot of this tiny Swiss village a few minutes earlier, him a shadow waiting in the darkness outside the lone restaurant as our car finally rolled up, so much later than we had planned.
“You are Joy? Joy Nicholas?” he had asked, after Matt switched on the dome light. Leaning forward from the backseat of our older BMW 118 where I was tightly wedged, I gave a shaky little wave.
“That’s me,” I’d replied.
He beamed. “I’m Jakob. Park here, and I will take you to the chalet.” It took a couple minutes of crawling out from under the backpacks and food we had piled on top of us, then unfolding ourselves and stretching cramped legs. We followed him down a little hill next to the gondola line to a chalet. Our accommodations were a cozy apartment on the top floor, simple but everything we needed. I was ready to collapse in one of the beds until the room stopped spinning, but Jakob wanted to chat.
So here I was, trying to decide if I should say “nipples” to the man I hadn’t known even ten minutes yet. This was like a party game–Catchphrase or Taboo. I was just about to volunteer “teat” (the most utilitarian option) when Jakob snapped his fingers with eyes so bright I could almost see an actual lightbulb switch on above his head.
“Milk stations!” he declared. The man liked the word “stations.”
“Ah, yes!” Matt said, smiling and nodding sagely. “Milk stations,” he repeated, as if it were a term he used all the time. I could tell he was avoiding eye contact with me—a wise move given that, even as sick as I felt, I was chewing the inside of my lip to keep from laughing. Really though, it was perfect. Milk stations. Of course!
“So! How did you come here? It takes you a very long time, yes?” Jakob asked. Matt took a deep breath and tried to describe the odyssey that had finally brought us to the chalet, skimming over the part where, a mere half hour earlier, we were all on the verge of a mental breakdown on a mountain in pitch black darkness. What time was it? I glanced at my watch. 10:30?!?! Had we really taken nearly ten hours to do a six-and-a-half hour drive?
That day–Friday of Labor Day weekend–was a half-day of school for the kids. Because Lilly is taking three AP classes, and we had a few errands to do before takeoff, we decided to leave once the kids’ were home instead of having them miss the whole day for the sake of an earlier departure.
Matt and I had discussed which car we would take: the cushy, comfortable Honda Odyssey with plenty of room for all of us, but not so efficient? Or the BMW 118 diesel (cheaper fuel, usually) six-speed? Not so much room–and by that I mean, I have to turn my size 7.5 feet sideways to get them behind the front seat if I’m sitting in the back–but extremely efficient and easy to maneuver into tight parking spaces. We chose his.
But here was the catch. Everyone had warned us that travel in Switzerland is pricey, and we should take our own food to cut costs. If it had just been the five of us, plus Mabel (our 14 pound dachshund), and clothes for the weekend, the 118 might have been a reasonable choice. Once we were loaded up, though, with food for the nine meals we would have there, since we didn’t know what grocery options would be available, and Lilly’s giant school backpack for doing homework, plus raincoats and umbrellas just in case, we looked like the Beverly Hillbillies.
“Let’s take your car,” Matt said, and I agreed in a heartbeat. As fast as we could–because the kids were home by then and it was already past noon–we transferred it all to the minivan, made our last trips to the bathroom, and headed out of town.
I had just said, “Well, we might pay more for gas, but at least we’re comfortable,” as we entered the last roundabout before the autobahn when Matt announced, “We have a slight problem.” The battery light on my super dependable minivan had just come on! After a short discussion about postponing our trip, we decided to simply switch cars. We’d divest some of the food in hopes that we could buy what we needed there without having to sell an organ to pay for it, and take care of this mechanical issue once we got home. A quick reverse of everything we had just done followed, and we crammed ourselves into Matt’s car.
Matt hit the ignition button, but his car didn’t start.
“Are you kidding me?!” I said. It wasn’t cold–he’d taken it out earlier–and it was usually so dependable. He gave me a look, then pressed the button again. This time it started. We cruised out of town, but not before Matt remarked grimly, “I give us about an eighty percent chance of getting to Switzerland tonight.”
“So you’re saying there’s a chance!” I replied as we sped onto the autobahn.
We crossed the border at Basel, and it was as astoundingly beautiful as every postcard or television show or magazine or Instagram post makes Switzerland out to be, worthy of all the superlative adjectives ever used to describe it. I was so grateful to be there. After a final gas/ potty break, we headed into the mountains. As we pulled onto the main road Matt said, “It says just sixty miles, but two-and-a-half hours to get there! That can’t be right… can it?”
It was.
The steep, twisty road clung to the edge of cliffs. Road construction required us to stop completely at least a dozen times, and we drove through 27 (give or take) quaint alpine villages with 30 mph(/ 50 kph) speed limits. The brakes, new since we bought the car, smelled hot a few times, despite driving in a low gear, so we pulled over to let them cool.
On the plus side, the views were spectacular! Until the sun set. Then it was just us and the darkness and a sadistic mountain road. Mabel doesn’t usually get carsick, but once she threw up on me on a perfectly straight freeway. She started acting weird, whining for the window to be rolled down and pacing across the back seat. We’d eaten baguettes, cheese, and cherry tomatoes for “dinner” on the road, so I constructed a sick bucket out of the tomato container lined with the baguette wrapper. It was flimsy, but at least it was something besides my hands.
And the truth was, I wondered if I might be the one who needed it.
I’d been sitting in the front seat at the beginning of the trip with Wyatt in the middle of the back. He’s taller than me and Lilly now and has larger feet that really don’t fit at all in the back seat without contorting his body into serious, advanced yoga poses. The sight of him with his knees up by his ears compelled me to pity, so I traded places. Now I was sandwiched in the middle of the back, which was good for road visibility but terrible if I needed to exit the car quickly. I kept praying the road would straighten out, but the route on Matt’s phone looked like a scribbly toddler drawing.
We were only about 10 kilometers from our destination when the navigation app told us to turn off the divided road that plenty of other cars were on and follow a somehow even more zigzagging road with one single, narrow lane into the dark night, alone.
“This can’t be right!” Matt grumbled. I had to agree, but what else could we do? After about seven minutes of torturous curves and seeing no other cars, the navigation abruptly instructed us to turn left.
“Turn left?!” Matt repeated. “Where??” He squinted into the darkness. “Did you see a road there?” We all shook our heads. After finagling a hair-raising three-point with a steep drop-off on one side of the road to turn us around, we discovered there was a road, sort of. It was more like a gravel path with grass growing tall between the faded tire ruts. I strained my eyes into the inky black beyond where the headlights shone, fully expecting someone to jump out with a chainsaw and start chasing us. “No! Way!” Matt muttered, but he drove onto it anyway. We had only gone about twenty feet when there was an awful scraping sound from under the car.
Matt lost it. “Joy! You said our Airbnb was only four-and-a-half hours away! We’ve been driving for nine hours!!!”
“Lauterbrunnen is! And that’s what I put into the search bar on Airbnb, but this place showed up! It was rated five stars from lots of people with kids and it’s not insanely expensive like the others!”
“But you didn’t check the actual distance?!”
“NO!! I sent it to you and asked what you thought!! Remember?! I assumed you would!”
“Well, that’s just great because now we are on a mountain in the MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT somewhere in Switzerland and I probably just took out the oil pan of our CAR!!!”
He was right. This was really bad. I wanted to cry. It was all done with the best intentions.
“Well, I’m so sorry!!! I tried!!! Tell you what! I’ll NEVER EVER plan another vacation AGAIN for the rest of my life, okay?!”
“Fine!!! But that doesn’t do us any good at the moment, does it?!”
“Could you guys not fight right now?!” Wyatt asked.
Both of us turned on him. “Oh!! So you can fight with Annalee all day, but we’re not allowed to have this discussion?!”
“GUYS!” This was Lilly. “Please!! Just stop!”
“At least we have ADAC?” I said quietly after a pause.
“Mommy, are we lost?” Annalee whimpered. How should I answer that? Yes, because the navigation was trying to take us down the road of poor choices? Or no, because we still had one bar of cell service.
“Um, maybe a little,” I replied. I tapped a message to the Airbnb host, praying we had enough service for it to go through, unsure of when he would read it, telling him our navigation was taking us a way that obviously didn’t work. Meanwhile, Matt turned the car around again, and again it made an appalling sound, though a little more quietly. I felt sicker than ever and breathed deep through my nose, trying to calm my stomach. Lilly wisely scooted away from me, but there wasn’t far for her to go. She was already practically smashed against the door.
“Want to trade places, Mom?” she asked. I declined, knowing she hated the middle seat. I would not throw up. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, I…
“Any reply?” Matt asked as he maneuvered us back down the mountain.
“No.”
“THAT’S IT! I’m just going to get us rooms at the nearest hotel, whatever the pri–”
“Wait no, here’s something. He says… ‘Go to Morel-Fillet.’”
“What is that??”
“I think it’s a town?”
“Fine! And?? Then what?”
“Hang on, he’s typing. Okay, he says, ‘Only street goes to beds village.’”
“What does that mean?”
“I am reading you what he said!! Just go!”
There really wasn’t anything else to do, so Matt obeyed. Sure enough, in the town we were directed to there was only one single-lane street with an arrow and the name on our reservation just below it. We followed it up another very dark mountain. I was having serious deja vu when my phone rang. It was Jakob.
“Yes yes, follow the road,” he said, after I explained the situation to him. “It goes back and forth and back and forth–many times! And then you arrive.”
“Oh. Um. Okay,” I said, trying not to sound too skeptical. That was exactly what we’d been doing since we crossed the border. I felt insanely nauseous, gritting my teeth to keep my food down.
“I see you soon.”
“Yes.” I hung up before adding, “Sure hope so!” But suddenly, a street light glowed onto the road ahead of us and there we were! We saw the parking lot, with Jakob waiting! Hallelujah!!! We’d reached the Promised Land after… well, not forty years in the desert exactly, but it kind of felt the same. And now here we were, in the warm light of the chalet, safe with cozy beds nearby.
“Ah! You take the adventure way!” Jakob said, when Matt finished with the tale. “There’s another road, much shorter.” So the adventure way was longer?! “I show you tomorrow.”2
Once we were–at long, long last–tucked into bed and apologies had been made for what we said on the dark mountain, I replayed the day in my mind. Time and again, I’d wondered if maybe all this was a giant neon sign from God not to go to Switzerland. I felt myself tense up, thinking maybe something was going to happen to our house or there would be a freak accident. But I also remembered recent conversations with Jayna and Skyler, my two oldest daughters, concerning some big decisions they’re facing and the difficulties they have to work out if they pursue what they love.
“Maybe it’s too hard,” they both said in separate conversations. “Maybe I shouldn’t do it.”
“Really? You think so? I can tell you for sure that whenever we’ve given up on something we really wanted just because it was hard, we’ve really regretted that decision,” I told them. “How often did we take the easy way?” I could give so many instances in our lives to illustrate my point, like how Matt and I married so young and have stayed together all these years, his career choices, my decision to write and keep writing even when it gets rejected or I delete an entire manuscript. Of course, it hasn’t always been a choice; some of what happened, especially in the past few years, was just the result of things far beyond our control. But we’ve pushed on anyway. Most of the time the view has been pretty good. Sometimes, it’s even been amazing.
Jakob’s words came back to me, “You take the adventure way!” Yes, he’d said it exactly right.
P.S. Eating out in Switzerland really is insanely expensive. We ate one meal out, lunch at a bakery cafe. We ordered three veggie paninis, a salami sandwich, a plate of fries, a large bottle of water. It was all just okay, not terrible but definitely not the best thing I’ve ever eaten. Guess what our total was? I’ll put the answer in my next post. Thankfully, there were grocery stores.
And now for a few photos. We saw the Aletsch Glacier and hiked Bettmerhorn the next day.
Going up Bettmerhorn was definitely hiking “the adventure way!” But so worth it!
The day after that, we drove to Täsch and took the shuttle train to Zermatt, then hiked up toward the Matterhorn (the real one, not the Disneyland ride!). We didn’t have time to do the whole thing, but a couple miles of hiking was still amazing and so beautiful.
Mabel enjoyed it too!
View from our Airbnb
What are times you’ve found yourself on “the adventure way”?
Name changed
We had put the address of the Airbnb in our navigation. Jakob had said something about texting when we got to Morel-Fillet, so I assumed we would go through there. Our app, it turned out, was trying to make us go on a private , forbidden (!!!) road that took us away from the town! After our conversation, we understood he meant we should put Morel-Fillet in the address and then text him for the directions from there. When we asked what he could do better, we suggested clarifying that. He’s a really great guy, though, and it’s a great place. I’m happy to share link with anyone interested in staying there.
This reminded me of the time we tried to bushwhack into a basin in Glacier Peak Wilderness using some sketchy google earth images. We had three pack goats in tow and by four hours in had made it less than a mile 😂 We ended up backtracking and did, in fact, sleep in our pickup that night.
To answer your question at the end, when I was in high school we accidentally got lost with my parents in rural South Dakota. We came about a random place with picnic benches and intended to eat lunch and make the best of a full day of unnecessary driving. All of a sudden this car of teens pulls up (we are VERY much in the middle of nowhere so this is quite odd) in their swim suits. We follow them back a bit into a secret little cove with THE clearest spring water I’ve ever seen! We all, of course, jumped in and it was our favorite day of the entire trip.
When I was a bit older, my husband and I unintentionally free climbed in the badlands. We were backpacking the badlands and got into a situation. We bouldered our way up a short rock area to find the most beautiful secret greenery. I’d have never known that was what was on top some of those rocks in the mostly desert badlands. We walked all day and tried to search for a way down. The badlands doesn’t have trails, so GPS is your only work around. Long story short, we could not find an easy route down so we had to carry our packs and essentially free rock climb down which was something I was NOT comfortable doing but did purely out of necessity. Anyway, the stories we can tell from that experience! It was one of our favorite trips!