I Dreamed of a Balcony. I Got a Bridge.

A few years ago, during a stretch of life that was mostly stress and anxiety, I started having the same daydream.

I'm sitting on a balcony in Switzerland. There's a cup of coffee in my hands. And across the valley, filling up the whole sky, is the Matterhorn.

That was the entire dream. No itinerary, no plan, no idea how a person from East Tennessee actually gets to a place like that. Just a balcony, a coffee, and a mountain. I'd go back to it the way you go back to a favorite song, and then I'd get up and go do whatever the day required.

On January 11, 2026, Brandy and I finally saw Zermatt in winter.

I never sat on that balcony.

Getting there is half the trip

We'd spent the week before in London, which is a story for another day. From Luton we flew to Geneva, took a train to Brig, and at Brig we picked up the Glacier Express for the last leg up the valley.

That was deliberate. There are quicker ways into Zermatt, and we didn't want the quicker way. Our train stopped at Visp, which is where most people change for an ordinary train up the valley, and we stayed on to Brig instead so we could ride the Glacier Express the rest of the way. It's one of the better decisions we made all week.

Take the scenic train. That's the whole advice. It costs more and it takes longer and it's worth every franc, because the ride itself turned out to be one of the best things we did in Switzerland. You're not killing time between destinations. You're already there.

Zermatt is car-free, so the train isn't a preference, it's the only way in. By the time we pulled into the station, the sun had gone down.

That turned out to be a gift. Our Airbnb was less than a ten minute walk from the platform. We dropped our bags and went straight back out to look around a village we'd only seen in the dark.

Brandy and I both landed on the same word that night: fairytale. Or a Hallmark movie, if you want the less flattering version. Lights strung through a tiny alpine village in January, snow, no engines anywhere, the whole place quiet in a way American towns just aren't. We wandered, we ate dinner, and we went to bed.

About that dinner. Food in Zermatt is expensive. All of it. Switzerland in general is expensive, and I'm not going to admit that in one sentence and then move on like it doesn't matter. We're doing an entire post on what this trip cost, because it's the first question most of you will ask and it deserves real numbers instead of a shrug.

Monday morning, and a mountain that wasn't there

We got up the next morning, walked out into the village, went straight to the bridge everyone goes to, and the Matterhorn was mostly gone.

Clouds. We could make out the peak and pieces of the shoulders, and that was about it. Glimpses. The mountain would surface for half a minute and then close right back up.

This is the part nobody puts in the brochure. Clouds sit on the Matterhorn for days at a time, and it's a 14,692 foot pyramid that weather can erase completely. You can plan a trip like this for years, spend serious money getting there, stand in exactly the right spot at exactly the right time, and see almost nothing. I’ve heard it said, “The mountain doesn't owe you anything.”

So we did what you do when the thing you came for isn't cooperating. We went and looked at everything else. We walked the village, in no hurry, for a good while.

And then we came back to the bridge.

The bridge

The sky had opened up while we were gone.

Not completely, but enough. Enough that the whole shape was there for the first time. The full triangle, that ridge line you've seen on a thousand postcards and a chocolate bar, standing at the end of the valley like it had been waiting on us the entire time.

We stopped, and neither of us said anything.

I teared up. I'm not going to dress that up or make a joke to get past it. I stood there in the cold next to my wife, looking at a mountain I'd been carrying around in my head through some of the hardest stretches of my life, and what I remember thinking is that I was lucky. Lucky to be alive. Lucky to be standing in a place a lot of people will never get to see, with the one person I'd want standing next to me for it.

No balcony. No coffee in my hands. The Kirchbrücke, the church bridge, in the middle of a village, in January.

I spent years imagining one specific version of that mountain, right down to the furniture. I got a different one. And the version I got is the one I'll be describing to people for the rest of my life.

If you go, that's the spot. The Kirchbrücke, the little bridge by the church over the Vispa, looking up the valley. It's no secret and you'll have company, but there's a reason everybody stands there.

By afternoon, not a cloud left

We rode the train up to Gornergrat in the middle of the afternoon, and by then the sky was completely clear.

The ride up is incredible on its own. And then you reach the top, and the views are simply breathtaking. If you only have time for one of the big mountain excursions, that's the one I'd send you to.

That's the honest lesson of the day, and it's the most useful thing I can tell you about this place. We saw almost nothing at nine in the morning and everything by three in the afternoon, in the same weather, on the same day. Don't write off a cloudy morning in Zermatt. Go do something else and come back.

Tuesday, and the trip back down

Tuesday, Brandy wasn't feeling well. She stayed at the Airbnb to rest, and I went up to Matterhorn Glacier Paradise on my own.

The trip is worth the cost by itself. You soar over the Alps in cable cars, higher and higher, until you're at Klein Matterhorn with a viewing platform, the Glacier Palace, a restaurant, a cinema lounge, and skiers heading off in every direction.

It should have been the highlight of the trip.

What I remember most about it, though, is the ride back down. I couldn't get to Brandy fast enough. I had a phone full of photos and a whole afternoon of things I wanted to tell her about, and the entire way down that mountain all I wanted was to be back in the apartment showing her.

Twenty-seven years in, that's apparently how this works now. The best thing I saw all week is the one I saw alone, and the memory I actually kept is of hurrying back to tell somebody about it.

The echo

The photos I've posted from that week are some of my favorites I've ever taken.

They don't come close.

I can't explain it any better than that. They don't capture the live view, and they don't capture what it does to you: the Alps in every direction, the winter air, the quaint little village underneath it all, and the Matterhorn standing over the whole thing.

We asked a waiter one night how many people actually live in Zermatt. About six thousand, he said. Six thousand people, in a valley with a mountain like that at the end of it.

If the weather cooperates, seeing the Matterhorn may be love at first sight. It's also a reminder of how small we really are, and I don't mean that as a sad thought. I've spent enough of my life feeling like everything depended on me. Standing in front of something that was here long before I was, and will be here long after, isn't a diminishment. Really, I think it's a relief.

This was a dream trip. A fantasy that came true, which is not a sentence I get to write very often.

Just not the way I dreamed it.

If you're thinking about going

Getting there. We flew into Geneva and took a train to Brig, and we planned it that way on purpose: we timed our arrival so we could pick up the Glacier Express out of Brig and get a longer ride on it into Zermatt. There are faster ways to reach Zermatt. Take the scenic one.

If you want to do the same, a few things to know. Coming from Geneva, your train will stop at Visp, and Visp is where most people change for the regular train to Zermatt. The Glacier Express doesn't stop there. Stay on to Brig if you want to ride it. Seat reservations are mandatory, not a nice-to-have, so this is a leg you plan around rather than decide on the morning of. The train runs year-round except for a maintenance break from mid-October into early December. Winter reservations open in mid-October, and first and second class open 93 days ahead of travel. Book that piece before you book much else. Note: verify all of this. It was accurate in January of 2025, but could have changed.

No cars. Zermatt is car-free. You arrive by train, and inside the village it's electric buses, electric taxis, and your feet. Our place was a ten minute walk from the station, which is fairly typical.

How long. Three days minimum. Two for seeing things, one as a buffer for weather. You'll probably need it.

The big excursions. Gornergrat, Matterhorn Glacier Paradise, and Rothorn. We did the first two. If you can only do one, make it Gornergrat.

On the weather. Check the visibility cameras before you buy lift tickets, but don't write off a bad morning. Ours went from mostly hidden at breakfast to a cloudless sky by mid-afternoon.

What it costs. More than you think, and we're not going to hand-wave it. That post is coming in December, with real numbers.