We’re back on the train again, this time for the five-hour trip from Copenhagen to Stockholm onboard the fabulous first-class car of one of Sweden’s high-speed trains. The ticket includes free Internet for the whole trip, and if I can figure out how to get it to work, I might post this before we arrive. But back in time:

So at Dijon after reevaluating the amount of time before our next planned stop (which by the way is the one I’m on the train to now) we decided to take a swing through Switzerland. It’s a country I’d more or less ignored in the planning stages of our trip, but that was because I had somehow managed to entirely forget that the Alps exist. When our guidebook reminded me of that fact, I figured we should go have a look.

We started with a quick stop in the western Swiss town of Lausanne, a medium-sized city set on a steep hill above Lake Geneva. As we trudged up it searching for the Musée d’Art Brut, every direction we looked we could see mountain peaks in the distance. But we were saving that for later. We were in Lausanne to see freak art.

The Musée d’Art Brut is dedicated to the work of mental patients, criminals, the developmentally disabled, or some combination of the above. It is kind of freak art, but it’s also the best art museum I’ve ever been to. All of the work is fascinating or beautiful or usually both, and most of it was created with the obsessively detailed techniques you can achieve only if you’re literally crazy. Some highlights in a museum full of highlights:

• Henry Darger’s massive series of drawings, some 10 feet long, that were discovered in his Chicago apartment after his death along with a 12,000 page book they were meant to illustrate. They tell an epic story of some imaginary war, mainly using kewpie doll drawings copied from old cartoons, some with satyr horns and male genitalia.

• The works of insane spiritualists, including one woman who, believing her hand was guided by voices from beyond the grave, sat and endlessly created minutely detailed architectural style drawings embedded with ghostly female faces, and a man who created similar work but composed of tiny Jesus-like faces surrounded by even tinier Jesus-like faces, surrounded by even tinier Jesus-like faces…

• Hugely elaborate and ornate three-dimensional paintings of fish built out of thousands of tiny seashells that the artist found, polished, varnished, and sculpted together into vibrant aquariums.

• Dozens of drawings by a concentration camp survivor Rosemarie Koczy, each called “I Weave You a Shroud.” In Judaism, the dead are buried in an elaborate ritual involving washing the body and wrapping it in a shroud. For the dead to be buried without that ritual is considered to be a grave sin. In the camp, Rosemarie witnessed countless Jews murdered and tossed naked into mass graves. After the war, she felt the task of bringing peace to them fell to her. She tried to atone for the dead by creating a shroud for each of them with her drawings, one per day.

I could go on. We were there for hours. It’s worth a trip to Switzerland, even if the bus-ticket-dispensing machine outside managed to steal five francs from me. After a quick trip back down the hill to see the lake, which is quite lovely and seems to run directly into the base of the Alp, we hopped back on the night train to Interlaken, checked into our hotel, discovered that the McDonald’s served both a McFondue and a McRösti, and got the feeling that looming all around us in the dark were mountains.

There were, and in the morning we went to see them. Pamphlets in our hotel raved about the Jungfrau region, the Alpine area a few kilometers south of Interlaken, which it said contained among other things the longest cable car in the world to the top of the Schilthorn. The tourist office told us it was $180 each for the 20km train ticket including the ride to the top. That would’ve seemed ridiculous if a McRösti extra value meal hadn’t cost $12.50. And we were there anyway, so we went for it.

At the station we learned that one reason the tickets are so expensive is that the journey up actually required a train, followed by a cable car, followed by another train, and then another cable car. And within a few minutes of leaving the Interlaken West station on the first train, the scenery took off. (By the way, during the course of this entry I’m going to run out of synonyms for “breathtaking,” “remarkable,” etc., so I’m not even going to try.) Rapids running through green valleys meandering through steep hills nestled into epic snow-capped peaks extending up into the clouds. At Lauterbrunnen, a little tourist outpost in the valley, we stopped at Staubbachfall to watch water come pouring out of a hole in the cliff and plummet 900 feet straight down — apparently a drizzle compared to when the melt starts in the spring. From there then boarded our first cable car for a five-minute ride up to Grütschalp at 4879 feet. As we rose the view expanded, the valleys spread out below us and the mountains continued to reach up endlessly.

Off the cable car it was another train (really a sort of one-car trolley) along the cliffside to Mürren, a village built into the hillside and prepared for tourists. Since it was right between the summer season and the winter ski season, there weren’t any, so we wandered through the chocolate-brown chalets and noticed how the views had become too large to capture with single photographs. They extended from tiny villages thousands of feet below us up nearly vertical pastures that sheep and cows somehow managed to stay attached to, then further up the towering mountains.

Mürren’s main road (the only one that runs horizontally) ends at the first true cable car station I’d ever seen, with three lines running off to three different destinations. We stared at ours, strung over the mountain overhead and disappearing into cloud cover, and wondered if it would be worth the trip. But we’d come this far and spent two days’ budget, so we climbed on and watched Mürren shrink away until the clouds closed in and we were enveloped in gray, bisected by the thin black line of the cable. Surrounded by monochrome. For minutes it felt as if we weren’t moving at all, until we gently pulled into the station at the top of Schilthorn, 9748 feet up.

At the summit of Schilthorn in the late ’60s, after the cable car was finished, an entrepreneur built a tourist center with a viewing area and a revolving restaurant. Just before it opened to the public, it served as Blofeld’s palace in the James Bond movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Now, everywhere you turn up there are placards reminding you of that fact, as if the owners feel like they need to prove to you that you didn’t waste your time coming all the way up there. Which is all very strange, because it’s the most remarkable place I’ve ever been.

The tourist center is surrounded by mountains, and even though you’re nearly 10,000 feet high, many of them are close to 4000 feet higher. They say that on a clear day you can see to Germany, but this day was overcast, so we didn’t get the full view. We got something much more remarkable. At first we were completely surround by clouds. But minute by minute, the cloudscape around us changed. For a moment we’d see nothing, then suddenly the sky opened to reveal mountaintops directly across from us, extending above the clouds, as if we were suspended in the sky. Then they’d be gone and others would appear behind us, or to our left. Then they’d go and green valleys would boil up below us, stretching out of view. Then the sky would clear completely. Then the clouds would close back in and form towering formations taller than the mountains. The weather morphed so rapidly that the scenery around us was a constant surprise. We never saw the same view twice.

Despite the freezing cold and foot of frozen snow covering the terrace, we sat on the metal steps and outside and ate our grocery store salads and stared in awe and were stared back at by mountain crows inches away who really wanted our rolls. Eventually, when the cold got to be too much, we went inside for $4 cups of coffee so Sophie could experience her first revolving restaurant, then boarded the cable car to head back down.

At Mürren we walked down the mountainside to the next village, along a switchback road past more sheep and cows and some ponies outside the farmhouses of Gimmelwald. Then we stood in the front window of the next cable car as it dropped us straight down over the edge of a cliff, and Sophie and I grabbed each other and kind of squealed and kind of laughed in joy. We looked up and watched paragliders — like skydivers without an airplane or hang gliders with a parachute instead of wings — as they opened their bright red chutes and ran off the edge of the cliff, then swooped down in arcs toward the valley. Just as we left the car at the bottom of the line, one of the fliers came floating down to a gentle landing on the grass in front of us.

We boarded a bus back to town, and I sat there filled not just with amazement at what we’d seen, but also with the first real sense that we were really traveling the world. We’d made our way from a museum of unimaginable art to the top of a mountain somewhere in central Europe that two day prior I didn’t even know existed.

Back in town that night I shopped for deodorant and washed my socks in the sink in the least remarkable ending possible to one of the most remarkable days of my life.