It is December 29, Downton Abbey is going to start up again in just a few days, and my intentions of writing on other subjects have become paving stones on a path to . . ..  Well, there is still time for one or two small efforts to break the gravitational pull that Downton has on me.  How about a travel note?

Last year, my wife Margy and I met up in northern Vermont with our two younger children and their fiancées (now spouses).  The plan was to explore the local towns, sample a country market or two, and hike to the top of a hill called Camel’s Hump.  A couple of years ago, Margy and I had done a backpacking trip in the mountains of eastern Switzerland, in an area known as Appenzell.  I figured we could handle anything that Vermont could throw at us.

There is an interesting difference between the ways the Swiss and the Vermonters view a hill or a mountain.  If the Swiss plan to run a train over a hill, they think in straight lines.  They will either run a tunnel straight through the mountain, which is their favorite method, or if they are in a particularly adventurous mood, they will run a cog railway straight to the top.  On an earlier trip, we had taken the cog railway to the top of Mt. Pilatus, not far from the Swiss town of Lucerne.  It is the steepest rail line in the world.  The Swiss have placed signs along the side of the line to inform passengers of the angle at which they are ascending.  They do this to help you enjoy the trip as you try to avoid whiplash while being thrown back in your seat.  At one point, you are ascending at an angle of 48 degrees.  They would have made it steeper had the terrain required it.

But if the Swiss are building a hiking trail over a hill, they don’t think in straight lines.  In their sober, sensible Swiss way, they build switchbacks.  The hiker is still climbing up a steep hill, but the climb is broken into many more steps and becomes manageable, particularly as the many turns provide a place where a hiker’s attention can be drawn away from the physical effort of the ascent to the beauty of the Swiss countryside as it gradually falls away.

The good people of Vermont take a different approach to a hiking trail over a mountain.  They just go straight up and down.  Rocks the size of cottages are no obstacle.  The path just goes right over them.  The view at the top of Camel’s Hump is definitely worth the effort.  We saw splashes of fall color in every direction for miles, but by the time we got back to the bottom I was as tired and as dehydrated as I have ever been.  My leg muscles were twitching, screaming for relief.  It took us six hours to go five miles!

Hiking through an area allows for moments that reveal the character of a place in a way that faster, and I might say more comfortable, modes of travel do not permit.  For example, on our Vermont hike, my son was wearing a University of Washington baseball hat, with a big W on the front.  As we were descending, we passed a group of locals who were going up.  They asked “Did you go to Williams?”  It took us a moment to connect the W.  We had to tell them that it stood for Washington, and we would demolish them in football if the two teams ever played.  It was clear that they were impressed.

The trip down from the top of Mount Pilatus in Switzerland was more leisurely – because we weren’t fighting for our lives as we clambered over the collection of outsized Vermont boulders that passes for a hiking trail in that state.  If the trip up Mt. Pilatus introduces the Swiss fascination, or mania, with trains, the trip down opens wider vistas into the Swiss mind.  You start the trip down by taking a funicular car that goes from the summit to a level area about a third of the way down the mountain.  The Swiss mountains are covered with these things.  It is almost as much a part of their transportation culture as the train.

The first phase of the descent introduces the Swiss love of order and the constant consideration that they show for travelers.  The car holds 75 people.  You enter a waiting area by passing through a turnstile.  There is an electronic reader-board hanging above the waiting area that tells you how many places are still available on the next car and when it is due to arrive.  The counter decreases by one every time someone passes through the turnstile.  That way, you know whether you will make the next car or, if you are going to miss it, how long you will be waiting.

After a brisk descent, you exit the car, and you can continue down by taking a smaller funicular or you can wander around first.  We wandered around into a heavily wooded hillside that was covered with thousands of wild blueberry bushes.  Swiss were spread out on the hillside, each person quietly huddled over a number of bushes, filling canvas shoulder sacks with fresh wild blueberries.  Margy and I stopped and ate a few handfuls of these delicious fruits.  I wondered if the natives would resent us outsiders eating their blueberries.  My sense was that they were bemused by our amateur approach to berry picking, evidenced by the lack of a proper sack, and overlooked our status as interlopers.  I think the Swiss sense is that it is not done to wander through the woods eating a few berries.  The proper thing is to make a day of it, bring home several sacks full of berries, and then produce something with them – jam, a pie, perhaps a blueberry stuffed wild boar.

We wandered about some more and ran into a high school class out for a day in the hills.  It turned out they were lost!  Verloren!  Even more surprising to me was that only their teacher spoke English.  In Zurich, everyone speaks English.  The check-out clerks in the grocery stores are multilingual and speak unaccented English.  But just a few miles outside Lucerne, you need to speak German (Swiss-style German anyway) to get by.  How bad did the luck of these students have to be to get lost on Mt. Pilatus and to have to seek help from some wandering Americans?  We knew the way to the downhill funicular and I stood in the path to show them the turning that would see them home, all 200 of them.  Each one gave me a hearty “Guten Tag” as they walked by and I returned their greetings, even as my throat dried up and my voice became progressively overworked, right up to the last Guten Tag I had in me.

A little further on, we found a metal half-pipe track dug into the hillside.  A tow rope on the side of this installation allowed customers, mostly Swiss youth in their early teens, to ascend the hill in bobsled-shaped wheeled vehicles that had a single bar in front that provided controls for braking and steering.  After the rope tow brought the car and accompanying youth to the top of the hill, another mechanism pulled the vehicle to the top of the track and sent the youth, the car, and the minimal on board controls on a fun-filled ride down the hill.

As we were walking past this activity, I heard a kid, a boy maybe eight years old, pleading with his parents to let him go on the ride.  They were highly reluctant.  Everyone was speaking English, the parents with a Caribbean accent (I correctly guessed Jamaican), the kid speaking like a U.S. kid.  The parents had emigrated from Jamaica to Florida, we learned.  The kid was a Florida native.  As the parents explained that the ride looked too dangerous, the kid countered that if he got hurt, they could sue the company that owned the ride.  The four adults thought that was pretty funny, that the kid knew all about suing people.

Two more funiculars, each one progressively smaller, take you to the wheelhouse at the bottom of the hill, a hundred feet or so above a suburban thoroughfare that leads back to Lucerne.  A steep curved street leads the traveler to a convenient bus stop.  There are signs at every turn pointing you in the correct direction.  You can’t get lost – unlike those high school kids, who may still be up on that mountain for all I know.

The buses run every ten minutes and before you know it you are back in Lucerne, ready for a beer.