Heinrichs in Belgium: Austrian Ski Holiday (Dec 2012)

We took our longest road trip to date and headed to Austria for a ski holiday over Christmas. We had a great recommendation from our friend Tracie (thanks Tracie!) on a kinderhotel in western Austria. These kinderhotels are awesome for families with young children. The one we stayed at is called the Habacklause. They had a self serve juice bar, all day ice cream, indoor and outdoor playgrounds, kids club, and kid's pool. The food was excellent and we got to taste a variety of Austrian specialties. We had an amazing time and the kids really loved Austria. They already asked if we could go back next year.

Our drive started off great, we left at 4am and the kids/dogs (yes, we brought them, we couldn't spend christmas without them!) didn't wake up until 5 hours into the ride. Things were going great until we hit traffic at a complete standstill outside of Munich. The traffic lasted for about 1.5 hour where we didn't move and had the car turned off. As we were all starting to unravel and getting tired of sitting around waiting for the traffic to let up, my mother-in-law's dog, Maci, decided make things interesting for us. There is only one way to say this....she wasn't able to hold it in anymore and did No. 2 on my poor MIL while she was being held and let's just say it wasn't the kind that could be easily cleaned up. Since we couldn't move or pull over, we were just stuck in the car, having to deal with this shit (literally). Here's a pic of Maci, she looks like she was plotting it the whole time.

Meanwhile, Tyler was upfront in a prime spot between Dale and I, passed out for the entire ride.

Beautiful view as we make our way into Austria

View from our hotel

The first two days, all Ethan and Ava wanted to do was swim at the heated pool. There was an indoor entrance where you can swim outside. They thought it was great to swim with snow outside! The pool wasn't warm enough for me but they did not seem to mind.

Warming up on the heated recliners in the mineral tepidarium

A little sauna action

We were lucky to get a few days with fresh snowfall which made it even more picturesque. We loved these pine trees draped in snow. The mountains were full of them and our ride up to the mountain was beautiful.

It was even more stunning when we got to the top. Here were the views once we got out of the cable cars.

The kids took ski lessons for a few days. It was amazing how quickly they can pick up on new things. Ethan really took a liking to skiing which culminated to a really important accomplishment on the last day (you'll see the video later in the post)!

The instructors took the kids on a ride during one of the breaks

Ethan's first ski jump on our last day....love his fist pump when he stuck his landing!

While the kids took ski lessons, Dale and I took snowboarding lessons. It kicked our butts (this picture was at the beginning of our lesson).

There's me walking back up the hill during the snowboard lesson. It looks like we have the mountain to ourselves!

On Day 2, I forced myself to snowboard on what they called the "beginner's hill". The ski mountain boasted that 45% of their trails were for beginners and these were noted as blue trails. What I discovered later is that "blue" really is intermediate and that the real beginner slopes are actually green, but they just didn't have it here. And the European definition of a beginner's slope is really an intermediate by US standards. Since I didn't have this information ahead of time, I was determined to put my new snowboarding skills to test. It took me an hour to get to the end of the trail and I had countless little European children fly by me in between all of the falling I did. I think I'm officially giving up and going back to skiing! But here is a picture I took during one of the many times I landed on my behind.

The mountain also had a 14 km (~9 miles) toboggan run that we went on. Originally the kids were going to ride with us but we were glad they didn't. The toboggan went pretty fast and it was harder to control than we thought it.

Geri was all smiles here but that quickly faded once the toboggan run started. We were told it takes 1 hour to do the run down the mountain. It took her 3 hours :)