Skiing in the Austrian Alps

This past week we were on a ski vacation in the Austrian Alps with some friends and their families. We stayed in a nice little Austrian hotel in the town of St. Veit im Pongau. We skied the Salzburger Sportwelt, a huge interconnected range of mountains with 850 km (about 530 miles) of trails.

All of us, even Evan, went to ski school each day to improve our skiing technique. We let Evan go for full days (10am - 3pm) the first two days, but then decided it was too much for him and did half days the rest of the week, so he could nap in the afternoon. The begining of the week he pretty much just shuffled around and down the hill, but by the end of the week he was actually skiing down the baby bunny slope and even turning a little. At the end of the second day I took him on a small green (blue here in Europe) slope so he could see what it was like to go on a longer run and to go a little faster. He really enjoyed that and asked several times to do it again, but riding a banana bar lift and holding Evan at the same time really wore out my legs. So I think he liked skiing and ski school. At the end of the week of ski school Evan got a medal and a certificate. Each ski class held a race on the last day, and Evan finished in 11th (of 11 kids), but he was the youngest one there. Emily finished the highest of the women in her class, at 6th place. I finished 7th (of 10 people), oh well.

Each night we had dinner at the hotel, which was then followed by optional evening entertainment such as a cow milking, yodeling, karaoke, curling and limbo contests. I think one of the most fun things we did in the evenings was sleding. On Thursday night we went to a 3km rodelbahn (a sled course) in the town of Winklalm. That was a lot of fun flying down a twisty slope side access road covered in packed snow and ice. Sleding was a bit like being Clark Griswold and Johnny Knoxville at the same time. I felt like we were going ridiculously fast at times, then we'd have some sort of spectacular crash (of course never caught on video) because we couldn't turn sharp enough or stop quick enough to avoid going off the road into the woods or over a hillside. The next night we found an even longer sled run (6km) in Radstadt that was just as much fun and dangerous. It was one of those "never in the States" experiences that makes being here more enjoyable. Hmm, I wonder if they sell lawn darts here...

I was working on discovering 50 ways to spill a beer during the trip. The first beer was knocked over on myself when trying to hand our meal selections for the next night to the owner, Barbara. The second beer was spilled at lunch time when some automatic doors closed on me and my lunch tray knocking the glass off the tray. The third beer was destroyed from above when an ice cream bowl slipped out of my hands and smashed the beer glass below it. I wasn't the only one breaking dishes though. Emily managed to break one of those glass ice cream bowls the next night in pretty much the same way I broke the beer glass, except this time there wasn't a beer glass to break the fall. The next night Barbara broke my glass in her attempt to remove it before I broke it or spilled something...

After a long week of skiing we decided to take a slight detour on our way home and hit the Rupertus Therme (thermal baths) in Bad Reichenhall. This was an excellent detour, because we missed most of the ski traffic going home in the morning and it was fun and relaxing for the whole family. There were salt water pools of varying temperatures, most indoor and some outside. Outside there was a large circular whirlpool that spun you round and round. Inside there were several jetted areas of the different pools. There was a grotto pool with a 12% salt content that allowed you to float on your back. It was supposed to be a quiet area of relaxation, that was until Evan arrived and chased everyone off.

Here's a mini album of pics from the trip.

St. Veit/Alpendorf Ski Trip