Martin and I often discuss the beauty of our story - the unraveling, unbelievable details that radiate the goodness of God. Our honeymoon was no exception. Martin decided that he would surprise me with the destination and only due to a slip in a conversation a couple of months before our wedding did I figure out that we were going somewhere in Europe; however, beyond that, I had no clue. Martin had been to Europe and various places within Europe a few times, so I had no clue where he may choose to take me. On my end, the only place I had ever been in Europe was the Zurich Airport on my way home from Mozambique. When I sat in that airport and could look out at the Alps, I thought to myself, "I would love to come back here. This would be an amazing place to go on a honeymoon - of course, I would have to find somebody who would want to come here, rather than a beach or something." It seemed unlikely. I never told Martin about that thought-conversation. All I had said when we spoke of travel was that based on the airport, I had wanted to go back to Switzerland one day.
As the days passed leading up to our wedding, Martin liked to play a game, "When we go to London, I mean Paris, I mean Italy, I mean Switzerland, I mean Berlin, I mean Austria, I mean....." My mom knew where we were headed, so she could make sure any necessary items were added to the suitcase. We got married on a Friday and left for the airport Saturday afternoon - to arrive at our destination about 8 am Sunday morning on European time. When we arrived in Dulles, we began to walk down the terminal, passing international gate after international gate. Martin asked me to guess which was ours. I had no clue. There at the very end of the terminal, the very last one, we arrived at our gate: Dulles to Zurich. I was so surprised and excited.
We spent our first day in Zurich - a local coffee shop, wondering about, the art museum. It was wonderful. The city was clean; the people congenial; the sites beautiful. As late afternoon came around, we got in our rental car and left for our next destination - The Grand Hotel Giessbach. We found it at the end of windy, narrow, mountain roads, sitting right on a lake in the middle of the Swiss Alps. If the lake was not enough, our room had a 200 foot waterfall right out the window that filled our room with its sound. Each day, we would say to one another, this feels like a dream. We had arrived there during peak week of fall colors on the trees. We rode a train to "The Top of Europe" of Jungfrau - one of the three main mountains - the Eiger, the Monch, and the Jungfrau. At the end of our four day stay at Hotel Giessbach, the mountains around us had lost nearly all of their leaves and the mountain tops were snowcapped. We couldn't have written a more perfect story to our time there.
We had a couple of options for where to proceed next on our honeymoon after Giessbach and decided to go to Grenoble, France. Martin had been years before with his family, and it held a special place in his heart. Off we went, driving through the Alps into Western (French) Switzerland, and then into France. We stayed two days in Grenoble and enjoyed its quaint simplicity, elegance and charm. On our trip back to Zurich, where we were to fly out on Sunday morning, we had two routes we could take. One would drive us pretty directly through the country and Basil, a city we had not yet seen; the other took us back through the mountains where we had stayed. We chose to see the mountains one more time at the expense of an additional 45 minutes to the drive: worth every moment. As we drove through Interlaken and then on to Brienz, the clouds sat low - just over the road and covering the mountains, slowly rising as we drove and opening up the landscape before us. The view before us manifested a real dreamscape you see in movies when the audience enters into a characters dream from reality. The experience articulated what the whole week had felt like: a dream, a dream come true, a dream we could never had dreamed coming to reality. We stopped in Lucerne, Switzerland for dinner and ate on the river. Our last night ended at a modern, trendy hotel in Zurich.
This adventure was a gift. A gift from my husband and my Father who wrote the perfect story. We could not go a day without having goodness chase us down and overwhelm us with joy, peace, awe, and beauty.