Bordeaux and Palmiers

While I sort through my Barcelona photos, take a trip down memory lane with me to Gruyères, a little town in Switzerland, where I went more than three years ago now… it doesn’t seem that long ago, somehow.

In Europe, there are some towns that are so quaint, so perfectly enveloped in the stereotype of what a little town in the mountains is meant to be like, it seems impossible that they actually exist. Gruyères is one of them.

I visited Gruyères when I was in Bern in 2005. My friends and I had been backpacking for several weeks by then, and when our hostel offered an organized trip to see the town and factory of Gruyères, as well as to have some fondue, we couldn’t turn it down.

The factory was very interesting, and we got to try free cheese, which is always a plus, especially to hungry backpackers, but my favorite part of the trip was to see the small town of Gruyères. On our backpacking adventures, we didn’t stop in many small towns: it was too difficult to get around without a car. Our focus on our escapades through Europe was the big metropolises: Rome, Paris, Barcelona. Gruyères was so different from anything we’d seen before.

Yes, it was more touristy than some small villages I’ve been since, especially after two summers in Paziols, where there’s really no tourist industry at all. But there’s a certain essence of these tiny towns buried in the mountains that I’ve since come to love, no matter how many mugs and postcards and snowglobes they try to peddle.

As we sat in on a terrace enjoying our fondue and looking over the mountains, I paused, as I find myself doing more often than not these days, to consider the fact that this—this traveling around, seeing places and falling head over heels in love every minute of every day—is my life.