I was summering.
And I don’t know about you, but this year I wanted to soak in every bit of it. I wasn’t quite ready for summer to end, and perhaps that meant being a little less interested in documenting it while I was living it.
But now that the season is beginning to turn, I wanted to share a little of where it took me, starting with my first trip to Switzerland.
The reason for going was simple: family. We have relatives who have lived there for several years whom we had never had the chance to visit. And if there is one thing Switzerland does exceptionally well, it is provide an almost impossibly idyllic backdrop for time together.
Geneva
We began with one evening in transit in Geneva.
Geneva is one of those cities where internationalism feels less like an identity and more like the natural order of things. Walking along the lake and across its bridges, you hear different languages without really registering the transitions between them. There are diplomats and expats, international students and families who seem well acquainted with the peculiar experience of building a life somewhere other than where they began.
The trams move through the city with expected Swiss precision. Cafés spill into the shopping streets and along the lake, perfect for an apéritif, or simply sitting quietly and watching everyone else go by.
It was only one evening, but enough of an introduction.
The following morning, we continued to Morges, where our family lives, and almost immediately drove into the mountains toward the Vallée de Joux.
Vallée de Joux
Imagine a chalet by a lake, surrounded by forest and mountains, in a small, remarkably preserved community where it still feels possible that everyone might know everyone else.
Locals will tell you that this, too, is changing.
Because hidden inside all that quiet is something rather extraordinary.
The Vallée de Joux is one of the great centers of Swiss haute horlogerie. Audemars Piguet was founded in Le Brassus and remains there today. Jaeger-LeCoultre traces its origins in nearby Le Sentier to 1833. For serious watch collectors, these tiny villages carry an importance completely disproportionate to their size.
We visited the Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet, and I highly recommend it, even if watches aren’t particularly your thing. There is something fascinating about understanding the degree of craftsmanship, patience and precision that emerged from this remote valley. It made me appreciate the landscape differently.
Because looking around, you would never imagine that somewhere so serene could hold such importance beyond its borders.
Mostly, though, the Vallée de Joux is simply a beautiful place to be with people you love.
Summer means swimming in the lake, long bike rides and evenings outside. Winter transforms the same landscape into somewhere for skiing, sledding and disappearing into a chalet for a few days.
We happened to be there for Swiss National Day on August 1, which meant a little street fair, music, food and local celebration in the village center. It was wonderfully unceremonious—the kind of celebration that seems primarily intended for the people who actually live there.
And then, from this quiet Swiss valley, we crossed the border into France for a pilgrimage of a very different kind.
Fort de Joux
As members of the Haitian diaspora, there was no question that we would go.
Fort de Joux sits just across the French border, high in the Jura Mountains. It is where Toussaint Louverture—one of the central figures of the Haitian Revolution—was imprisoned by the French after being captured and deported from Saint-Domingue in 1802. He died there the following year.
I knew the history.
Standing there was different.
There are places where history stops feeling like something you have read and suddenly becomes physical. The walls are real. The cold is real. The distance from Haiti is real.
I found the visit deeply emotional.
Toussaint represented an idea that was radical far beyond Haiti: that freedom could not belong selectively to some people and remain freedom. I kept thinking about the magnitude of what he and that generation imagined—and what Haiti’s revolution ultimately proved possible.
And inevitably, I thought about everything that came after.
About the country Haiti might have become. About the forces, both external and internal, that shaped what followed. About the strange inheritance of being Haitian and carrying enormous pride in what your ancestors accomplished alongside grief for what your country has endured.
For Haitians and their descendants who have the opportunity, I think Fort de Joux is worth the pilgrimage.
I cannot promise it will change your life.
But maybe it will mend something. Or, at the very least, give you a place to put something you have been carrying.
Morges
After a week in the Vallée de Joux, we returned to Morges for a few days.
Morges is small and exceedingly charming, with a beautifully preserved historic center, cafés and independent shops tucked along pedestrian streets, and a promenade beside Lake Geneva that seems designed for walking at virtually any hour.
There isn’t necessarily a great deal you are supposed to do there.
That might be the point.
We also spent a day in nearby Lausanne, which offered a little more movement—a larger, younger, more metropolitan version of Swiss life, climbing upward from the lake.
And somewhere between the two, I began to understand both Switzerland’s appeal and why I remained slightly outside its spell.
A Version of It
Switzerland, I have decided, is not entirely my kind of place.
I need a little vibrancy. A little edge. A place where something occasionally colors outside the lines.
Switzerland is extraordinarily quiet, orderly and precise. For someone like me, who tends to enjoy places with a little beautiful disorder, it can feel almost too perfect.
But I understand the seduction.
Who wouldn’t want extraordinary public transportation? Trains that make the idea of needing a car feel almost absurd? Streets where children seem to move with an independence that has disappeared from so many places? Mountains and lakes at your doorstep and an infrastructure seemingly designed to make everyday life simply… work?
There comes a point in life when ease becomes its own kind of luxury.
So, for the right opportunity, would I live there?
I wouldn’t say no.
But if the world were completely open to me and I could choose anywhere, Switzerland probably wouldn’t be my first choice.
At least, not yet.
Because I’ve only met one version of it.
There is still German-speaking Switzerland. The Italian south. The mountains covered in snow. Winter in a chalet, when the lakes and trails I knew in August become something entirely different.
Perhaps Switzerland deserves another chance in another season.
Until then, Switzerland, you were idyllic.
Maybe just a little too idyllic for me.
Isabelle Alerte is the writer behind In Written Word, an editorial site on place, taste, and lived experience. She lives in Miami.
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