I tell my daughter that the word “Swiss” is basically a euphemism for efficiency, quality, taste, health, order and alpine beauty. “And don’t forget the happy cows,” she adds, observing herds grazing in the lush valleys. My daughter is staring out a train window at a moving vista of snow-capped peaks, wooden chalets, sharp church steeples, blue lakes, fairy-tale castles, looming glaciers and fairway-like farmland. It’s enough to make us want to yodel ‘bucket list’ at the top of our lungs.

Our ticket to all this is the Swiss Travel Pass, which offers unlimited travel across the country by rail, boat or bus. This also includes 90 cities and towns, discounts on activities and free admission to 500 museums and attractions. I’ve brought my daughter along because:

A: Kids under 16 get a free travel pass when accompanied by at least one parent
B: My daughter loves chocolate, cheese and cows
C: My wife was unavailable

Granted, my wife would object if I made her run off a mountain, while my daughter complained the mountain wasn’t high enough. If there’s one thing to do in Switzerland, it’s run off a mountain, but we’ll get to that.

Leaving Interlaken, we board the first of several express panorama trains, and I find it somewhat heartening that the GoldenPass Express to Montreux is late and then gets cancelled altogether shortly after we board. Turns out the Swiss are human after all, and while you can usually tell the time by the train schedule, hiccups occur here like everywhere else. Of course, being in Switzerland, we were simply directed onto a regional train, which crossed the same stunning territory and added a mere 40-minute delay. When trains break down elsewhere, you can get stranded for days. 

Now we’re in Montreux, buttressing the shores of deep-blue Lake Geneva, replacing Swiss-German accents with Swiss-French. From the station, it’s a bus ride to our hotel, and we can see why Switzerland enjoys one of the highest public transport commuter rates in Europe. The network is efficient, clean, and safe. The region’s most famous icon was the American film star Charlie Chaplin, who was kicked out of the U.S. during McCarthyism and retired to the neighbouring town of Vevey with his glamorous wife and eight children.

Zermatt is bustling, with odd narrow vehicles shuttling tourists, supplies and construction material about town. If there’s one thing you have to do in Switzerland, take the showpiece Matterhorn Glacier Paradise to the highest cable-car station in Europe (3883 metres). At the top, my daughter beelines for another ice palace built into another glacier with ice sculptures, but this one has an ice slide for an extra thrill in the chill. We devour traditional rosti (Swiss hashbrowns) in a restaurant at the top of the world, take a return ride on Europe’s highest peak-to-peak cable car across the valley to Italy and return to soak in the jacuzzi pool of our hotel. Although fall is shoulder season, Zermatt is buzzing with tourists, and ritzy boutiques are busy. If there’s one thing you need to do in Switzerland and you’re chasing the glitz, then catch the Glacier Express to St Moritz.

The eight-and-a-half-hour Glacier Express connects Zermatt to St. Moritz, rolling through 91 tunnels, 291 bridges and unfiltered alpine scenic bliss. Anticipating a long day on a train, I expect my daughter will catch up on her schoolwork while I get some reading in. The Glacier Express has other ideas. We travel across wild loop tunnels, dramatic peaks and waterfalls, a barrage of medieval villages, forests exploding with fall foliage, and the deep-ravined Rhine Gorge. We make friends with fellow passengers, have a three-course lunch, and next thing we know, we’ve arrived at the St. Moritz Station, school pages lightly dusted and my book unopened.

We’ve been fortunate with the crisp October sunshine all week, but the days are cooling fast and the fog is settling in. Now we’re in Swiss-Italian territory, where we pick up cultural differences from the German and French regions. Switzerland has four official languages: German, French, Italian and Romansh (a minority language descended from Roman Latin). As you would expect, the French region felt more laid back than the German regions, and the Italian region even more so than the French. If there’s one thing you have to do in Lugano, it’s wander about old town, dine in an excellent Italian restaurant and rue the fact you didn’t plan to spend more time here.

Heading north, the Gotthard Panorama Express is an engineering marvel, ascending into high mountain tunnels above the Gotthard Base Tunnel, which is 57 kilometres long and is currently the world’s longest railway tunnel. We’re taking the slower, scenic route because we’re here for an experience, which includes on-board guides, photography coaches and a wild looping mountain tunnel that allows us to capture the Baroque church of Wassen from three different angles. 

Throughout our journey, with all the castles, villages, towns and monasteries, we have seldom left human settlement behind. People have settled in these mountains and valleys over millennia, manicuring a postcard-like landscape of what has come to define alpine beauty. Canada’s rugged and remote Rockies offer a different alpine value proposition, although there’s an undeniable Swiss influence in our own Rocky Mountaineer.