A SWISS WELCOME

THE JOURNEY IS MORE EPIC each year. This time, the remnants of Hurricane Barry were due to arrive in Boston just at take-off time, and the weather people were spot on. We taxied to the runway to join the take-off queue. A couple of small planes departed, then the Lufthansa 747 ahead of us was given the green light. We moved to the head of the line. Where we waited, as a number of smaller planes were permitted to come to ground -- a blessing, we were sure, as black thunderheads moved in from the west and large raindrops began to splatter across the plane's porthole windows,

"We are being held," the pilot informed us. "A serious squall line is passing through. We'll turn off the engine and wait here until the storm subsides." And we that, Boston shut down Logan airport. What followed was new to me, though the pilot had a here-we-go-again quality to his short speech. Outside the plane, night had fallen suddenly at 5:30 p.m. with rain obscuring the view entirely, except for forked, intense lightning strikes and thunder that arrived only seconds after each flash. The passengers, who had been chatting nervously, were respectfully silent. We sat through this excitement for 20 minutes or so, when the darkness lifted. Across the field, a fire truck was responding to a call. "Having way too much fun" is one ironic way to describe it. Finally, the pilot called the engines to life, and I wondered if others joined me in asking myself whether it was a good idea to chase this storm across Boston Harbor.

As it turned out, the pilot knew just what he was doing. In a steep climb, our low-mileage Airbus 300 shrugged off some minor shudders as we rose above the storm and outpaced it. Our business-as-usual flight landed in Zurich just a few minutes late, and soon the SBB Intercity 8 train was whisking us across the country to Visp.

It's a wonderful journey when it ends at the Christiana Hotel in Zermatt! Michel Franzen, part of the third generation to run the hotel, had arranged a simple soup-and-salad luncheon to refresh us when we arrived.

Before we knew it, we were enjoying a welcoming bottle of iced Les Murettes, a local Swiss wine, along with a basket of fruit and chocolates as we relaxed on the balcony looking out at the Matterhorn. (More about that spectacular sky later.)