FLOW STATE

Some might argue that Devin Friedman went to the Swiss ski town of Crans-Montana for all the wrong reasons. But instead of keeping up with the Joneses, he found a sense of calm in the most unlikely of places.

IT GIVES ME no pleasure to admit that I undertake a significant proportion of my travel out of sheer spite. I mean, not 100 per cent-I'm not an animal. I am theoretically capable of experiencing joy, wanderlust, and many other positive human emotions. I'm talking about the other part of me. The part that hears parents at my kids' school talking about going on some fancy ski vacation and immediately feels a sense of resentment. A suspicion that everyone is in a club that I'm not a member of the club where people talk about ski vacations in a jaunty shorthand: "Oh, yeah, we go to Jackson every year. It's sort of our place."

For the past year, my family and I have been living in Madrid. When a school break comes around, no one talks about skiing in Jackson or Steamboat or Tahoe. They talk about Zermatt and Courchevel. They talk about Baqueira, the St.-Moritz of the Spanish Pyrenees, where the king often visits, where the après-ski parties start at the very Spanish hour of midnight and everyone apparently leaves their kids alone in hotel rooms and parties until dawn.

So while I did want to visit the Alpine village of Crans-Montana, in southwestern Switzerland, for pretty normal reasons-it's beautiful, the food is excellent, and the skiing is world-class-the truth is that I also wanted to go to Crans-Montana so that, after break, when people started talking about how they went to Gstaad this year and the snow was kind of disappointing but it was still wonderful, I could say, "Yeah, we just came back from Crans." Which I would pronounce in the French way (Khhhraaaaaan), even though when I first heard the name two months beforehand I thought it sounded like a brand of cranberry soda marketed to French people by the Pepsi corporation.