Tirol adventure

If you look just south of Germany, you will notice that there are many large mountains that have produced some of the most accomplished winter Olympians in history. We were lucky to join our good friends in renting a house to go skiing in Kaltenbach which is in the Zillertal valley of Austria. It is nice that it is so close (90 miles), and less than two hours away from our city apartment.

The valley has a huge vertical rise which produces steady skiing from October through May each year. We took a 15 minute gondola ride each day to reach the "snow" and then took lifts from there to the peaks which rose above 3000 meters.

We had to begin by getting gear which meant the usual interaction with nice locals as our group caused chaos in the store. David discussing how he was going to jump the tallest peak, Brian indicating that he was looking to get back to the house for dinner each evening, and Julia discussed how, on the whole - she would rather be in Philadelphia.
Here is Brian going up the first Gondola.
The views were outstanding! The mountains rose straight up and produced stunning panoramas.
The boys were sent to ski school with the German, Austrian, and Dutch kids while Julia tried to say how she would like to stay home and read/knit. She was unsuccessful. I made her attend "Dad's ski school" which was tough at first but improved as she realized there was no other option except to join Brian.
Classes included - pretending to have some fun, going slow in non-dangerous situations, taking long breaks during peak skiing hours to have an expensive Pepsi, and taking your father's picture during a sunny lunch. She got a B.
Our weather was great - sunny and bright with unlimited visibility and temperatures of 0 degrees C/ 32 degrees F. You can see that Julia had plenty of snow to turn in on the hill.
By the end of the week - it got good enough that she couldn't complain.
The only problem was that our best skier - Daphne - experienced chronic knee pain and swelling that only allowed her to ski on 2 of 6 possible days. This was like taking George to the park to play with squirels but keeping him on the leash while his friends feasted on unlimited small prey. BTW - George had a vacation at the kennel.