By the time we landed in Palma de Mallorca it was two in the morning, the delay from Stansted having eaten the difference. The airport was mostly lights and cleaning machines. My connecting flight to Zurich was not until six, and because the two budget legs were separate bookings, I cleared passport control and then walked straight back through security, nodding at the absurdity of doing both within the same hour.
I found a row of seats with no armrests, which at that hour in that airport might be the single most valuable thing a person can own. Wide enough to stretch out on, my backpack folded under my head like a pillow that fought back the whole time. I got something like two hours before it was five and time to move toward the gate.
The six a.m. Vueling flight was short, and I remember almost nothing about it, which is probably the point of a flight at that hour. What I remember is Zurich: half past seven, fog resting on the runway, everything quieter than any airport I had walked through before. My first time out through Kloten, and the doors opened onto a morning so calm it felt like someone had turned the volume down on purpose.
A friend, a dog, and a mountain that said no
There was no time to enjoy the quiet. I followed the signs down into the train station built underneath the airport itself, chasing an 8:15 to Lucerne I did not fully understand the importance of until I was already running for it. Miss it and the next one was thirty minutes out. I had a ticket that was good for travel any time that day, the kind of ticket that does not care when you use it.
The ticket did not care what time I used it. Everyone waiting on me did.
I made the 8:15 with nothing to spare, watched the fog thin out into ordinary daylight through the window, and stepped onto the platform in Lucerne at twenty five past nine. My friend was not there yet. They had parked outside the city center to dodge the cost of parking downtown, which meant a ten minute wait I did not know I was serving until it was over. They live in Solothurn, an hour away, and had driven in that morning for exactly this. We found each other at ten to ten, and they had brought their dog, Loki, twelve years old and entirely unbothered by any of it.
We had a Swiss breakfast at Restaurant Fritschi that I did not photograph, because I was hungry enough that my phone did not exist to me for the length of the meal. It was already hot outside, the kind of morning heat that tells you exactly what the afternoon is planning to do.
We loaded my ten pound bag into the trunk of their car and spent the drive arguing gently over where to hike, settling on Rigi, from the Weggis side. We made it about halfway up before the heat won an argument we had not officially had, and turned around. Some of the shaded routes were closed anyway, we were told, because of avalanche risk that had not fully let go of the mountain yet, even in June.
