Weeks 34 & 35: Christmas, Skiing and New Years

I hope everyone had a great holiday season and an excellent start to 2012. Our Christmas was low key, but we did get to celebrate Christmas Eve with some of Jason's co-workers. For that event, Jason made the ever popular Wacky Cake, which, with the help of the internet to find a template, I decorated with some confectioner's sugar. Despite there being far too much food at the festivities, we only came home with about half a cake, so it was, at least, a modest hit.

Frosty frosts the wacky cake

Christmas day was spent doing a little cleaning and then packing for our ski trip to Austria. We departed on the 26th and drove about nine hours to St. Veit am Pongau, The trip requires a little introduction: it was a package tour, organized by a group from Ramstein, the other larger American base in our area of Germany. I heard about it through my personal trainer. We figured it would be a good chance to do get away, do some skiing and meet some people.

We arrived after dark, went to the tour office, found out where we were staying and drove our car up a rather steep and frightening road to our guest house. We decided we were going to move the car as little as possible after that drive and mostly walked to dinner and town (about 20 minutes along the steep grade) for the week we were there, only using the car to drive to the ski area. We ended up having to leave the car in town for the last few days, as the foot or so of snow that fell completely impeded our ability to get up the hill. If we had only brought chains...

The view from our guest house--the town is over Jason's shoulders

Though the location of our accommodations left something to be desired, the skiing was great. We drove about 10 minutes from St. Veit to get to the Ski Amade area, where we took a gondola up to the ski slopes. The Ski Amade area is a semi-linked alliance of ski areas. You can see the full map here (we took the gondola up from Alpendorf). Some of the areas can be easily skied between, others require the use of buses.

Alpendorf gondola station (top)

Our package included five days of skiing with group lessons. We had two days of fantastic sun, which reminded me of spring skiing (you could almost go without your jacket) followed by three days of skiing between snowflakes. As I told Jason after the trip was over, I think skiing with an instructor helped me spend far more time on the slopes than I would have otherwise. Just having someone else there who is going to keep doing runs no matter what the weather (he's getting paid to do it), was enough to keep me skiing despite the snow building up on my hat.

It was the first time in 20 years that I had taken any sort of ski lesson. Jason had never taken one. We both, though, found it to be quite beneficial--I have to say, Jason looked much better on the slopes; I hope I had an equal amount of improvement. We ended up in separate groups for the duration, but since my group was dwindling to only two of us by the afternoon of the last day, Jason came and skied along with us. Between that afternoon and our pre and post-lesson runs, we did a fare amount of skiing together.

The view from one of the runs

Overall, we had a good time, though next time I think we will forgo the package deal and book on our own so we can ensure being a bit closer to the slopes and avoid driving as much as possible. Additionally, the package aspect left little opportunity for us to relax--after skiing we would take a quick shower before hiking down to dinner and the evening activities. Additionally, we were skiing while all of Europe had a vacation. While we were fortunate to have short lines on most of the days (primarily due to the weather), since we only have our own schedules to work around, we could certainly pick a less congested week.

Lift-line during good weather

Once again, we wish everyone a great start to 2012!