A Week on Lake Geneva, Switzerland

When you live permanently in Florida, choosing where to go on vacation can be harder than it sounds. We already live in one of the country’s great vacation destinations—beaches, resorts, boating, fishing, nature preserves—and people from colder states pay handsomely to spend a week where we live year-round. Remaining close to home hardly feels like a sacrifice, which is exactly why the staycation is so tempting.

But travel should occasionally do more than provide a different swimming pool and another restaurant reservation—it should put enough distance between us and our routines that we begin noticing how other people live. An invitation from longtime friends in Vevey, Switzerland, became the icebreaker for this year’s trip; after nearly a year of planning, we chose the last week of August, trading one of South Florida’s hottest months for a milder European summer.

I went with two things in mind. One was the desire to explore a country I had never seen firsthand, with its reputation for scenery, public order and quality of life. The other was a self-imposed assignment familiar to anyone who tells stories about places for a living: to return home able to tell our readers whether Switzerland was worth the long journey from our comfortable corner of Florida.