Lake Geneva for an Afternoon, Then South Overnight

A day trip to Lake Geneva came before the last overnight train of the Eurail leg. Lausanne first, hillside streets down to the lake, conical red-tiled turrets topping the old white townhouses that stack up the slope like the city had decided uniformity was less interesting than a skyline with a few opinions in it. Cranes stood over the rooftops in a couple of places, the city visibly still adding to itself even in December, and it was all free to walk regardless of how the view alone felt like it should cost something.

Montreux followed, twenty minutes down the shoreline, the lake doing most of the work again, mountains on the far side turning the water into something closer to a fjord than I expected from a lake. Between the two towns it was easy to see why this stretch of shoreline has spent so long being painted and photographed by people with considerably more talent than a phone camera and two weeks of practice.

We rode back to Bellach for one last evening before I caught a night train south to Chiasso, arriving at the Swiss Italian border a few minutes past midnight. Packing that last bag in Bellach felt different from every other packing job on this trip, less like leaving and more like the actual end of a chapter, even though the trip itself still had over a week left in it.

It was the last overnight train of this half of the trip, and I took the quiet ride as its own kind of ending.

I watched Switzerland go past in the dark one final time before tomorrow turned everything toward Italy, then north again, toward somewhere entirely different. Two and a half weeks of trains had taught me a specific kind of patience, the kind that stops needing to see anything out the window to feel like the trip is still moving forward, and Chiasso arrived exactly as advertised: quiet, a few minutes past midnight, and technically still Switzerland, the actual crossing into Italy saved for the morning.