I grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, and two things aroused my early travel imagination: palm trees and snowcapped mountains. Seeing either of them meant I was somewhere very special, exotic even. One of my core childhood memories: a cog railway leading up from Grindelwald, in Switzerland, into the permanently snowcapped peaks of the Bernese Oberland. A yellow and green train that looked very much like a toy train clicked up the steep slope of the mountain like the slow start of a rollercoaster. I still remember the uncontrollable excitement of first visiting Switzerland to ride the train with my parents during a school holiday.
From left: the author’s mother, Kathleen, Aunt Mary, Uncle Sean and grandmother Rita photographed in Zermatt, 1960
The pull of this memory drew me back to this same place years later, in 2017. I come from a skiing family. My grandparents moved to Switzerland in the 1950s, and my mother, grandfather, aunt and uncle would ski every weekend. My parents met while studying in Fribourg. My uncle moved to a Vermont ski town, and all of my cousins grew up skiing there and across the US. I was a bit older, and my interests were of a more urban-New York nature. So while I was on skis from the age of five, once I left for the city the sum total of my time on the slopes consisted of a few weekends in Vermont and a trip to the Poconos, Pennsylvania, which ended with a broken leg.
