After arriving back home from Chamonix Monday night, we had a quiet week at home, which was heaven after rushing around the last few weeks. We have been going non-stop since my parents’ arrival and needed to catch up on things around the house and sleep.
Softball tryouts start for Brooklyn next week, so this week she attended pre-tryout conditioning sessions every day after school. Brooklyn also made high honors for the first semester of the school year! She has been working so hard and we are so proud of her!
Ryan was also pretty proud of himself this week as he was elected to be the assistant-leader of his Boy Scout patrol group. This just means he will have much more responsibility and accountability in the planning and execution of their camping trips. It is really cool that he was elected considering he just joined in the fall. He is really excited about the new job and has already been working on planning the next camping trip. We are so excited that he’s going to get this opportunity to practice more responsibility!
On Friday after school, we dropped both kids off at the ski club bus. They were heading to Ski Amadé, in Austria for the weekend with their club. They both attended this trip last year but since Matt had just had his knee surgery, we were unable to travel. This year, we booked our own ski holiday in St. Anton, Austria!
After the kids were settled on the bus, we dropped the dogs at the dog sitters’ and started our drive. St. Anton is the biggest ski area in Austria and where skiing was supposedly invented. Its also well known for its huge apres-ski party scene. For this reason, and for historical research purposes, of course 😉, we chose this as our parents-only weekend getaway. As we approached St. Anton, we noticed the temperature drastically dropped and there was fresh snow on the ground. It felt like a super treacherous journey up the winding mountain roads to our hotel!
We had hit terrible traffic heading out of town, so did not arrive until around 9pm. There, we found I had accidentally booked a youth hostel for the weekend! 🤣 It was so funny! Thankfully, we at least had our own room and bathroom but it was pretty loud with all the other university groups staying there!
Our hotel, ahem hostel, was actually in St. Christoph. Since we booked so last minute, the prices in St. Anton-proper were crazy, so we settled on this village just up the road which ended up being really nice. St. Christoph actually has its own access to the St. Anton ski area via the St. Christoph gondola right next to our hotel. However, the only way down into the St. Anton valley would be by more advanced ski trails, which we have not worked up to yet. Also accessible from St. Christoph is the Vallugabahn, a cross mountain gondola which takes riders to the peak of Valluga Mountain, one of the highest in the region, from where you can see five countries.
For Saturday morning, I had signed Matt and I up for a private lesson. With both of us being so anxious last weekend, we agreed we could both use some tips from a professional to work our confidence back up again, and to protect our knees. I found a website called CheckYeti, which is pretty much Uber for ski instructors, and lined one up to meet us at the location of our choosing. The price was amazing too, much less than what we ever paid to have the kids in ski school and those were with a class, not one-on-one.
In the morning, we met our instructor, Seppo, at the lift. He told us a little bit about himself; he is originally from Finland and had been on the Finnish national ski team, and had been skiing in St. Anton every season since the 90s. We also learned he had suffered almost the identical injury as Matt, but in his right leg, over 30 years ago! It was reassuring to see that not only is he still skiing, he is still making his living from the sport.
When we got to the top of the gondola, Seppo took us over to the bunny slope, the “Hoppelweg,” and took our poles, and told us we were starting over at square one as beginners. We re-learned how to properly stop, turn, and follow the fall-line of the mountain. It honestly felt a bit tedious at first, and definitely very humbling to be doing the pizza in a crowd of little kids, but I would be lying if I said it was not 100% helpful. I know over the years, we have created some bad habits and this was a huge help in building back up our skills. After a little while, we hit the regular slopes with Seppo and noticed a huge change in both our technique and anxiety levels.
Our lesson was over in the early afternoon and we said goodbye to Seppo. It was such an awesome and valuable morning for both of us. We exchanged contact information and hope to ski with him again! Matt and I headed to the Panorama Terrace for lunch.
After lunch, we did a few more runs and then started skiing back down the mountain. We stopped at a couple of huts along the way to enjoy St. Anton’s famous apres ski scene.
We loved our day skiing in St. Anton! The views and scenery were just amazing; coming in second only to the mountains we just saw in the French Alps. There were just so many trails, we didn’t even scratch the surface of St. Anton’s ski areas. We are hoping to get back for another weekend next year to try our skiing in the neighboring village of Lech, which forms part of the St. Anton ski area. We also want to come back to St. Christoph to take the cross-mountain gondola, the Vallugabahn to the peak of Valluga Mountain.
We finished the day with dinner back at the hotel, which lucky for me, was an Italian restaurant and had the best pizza I’ve had in a long time.
On Sunday, we slept in. I wanted to sleep in longer but Matt finally forced me up at 9am to go down for breakfast. While we were getting dressed, we checked the breakfast time and saw that not only did breakfast end at 9am, we were supposed to be checked out by then! Apparently, you need to leave youth hostels pretty early in the day.
We quickly threw everything into suitcases and ran downstairs to check-out. Luckily, after we had turned in our keys, they took pity on us and allowed us to grab a quick breakfast. It was actually a blessing in disguise as it made us pack up really fast and gave us almost a full free day. We decided to do what all good Germans do after skiing and go soak in a mineral bath and hit the sauna. Arlberg Wellcom was really the only therme in town and although it was small compared to others, it was only 16 euros so the perfect price for me.
After we has soaked and sweated for a couple of hours, we headed home, arriving early enough to pick up the dogs and have all of our things washed and put away before it was time to pick the kids up from the ski club bus at 10pm.
The kids had a blast on their ski trip. Ryan was able to join a small class of freestyle skiers and spent an entire day learning the proper way to go off jumps and do whatever other tricks freestyle skiers do. He was so excited he made the cut and had so much fun, not to mention made so much improvement over the weekend. Brooklyn also had a blast and was happy to have finally made it on a trip!
Gilcrests Abroad 