European Holiday - Taking the Bad with the Good

Update: We returned from our vacation on Feb. 22 and I am just NOW getting around to posting this blog, which I wrote on the train trip home. I can't believe how busy we are here and how long it takes me to sit and write this blog!!

Written on 2/22: This past week was the kids’ winter break and we did what every European family does during winter break - ski! Boy, was this a learning experience. 

Our first hint that this wasn’t going to be like a US/Montana ski vacation was when, in early January, we started trying to find a place to stay for this February vacation. Yes, this was a bit late to be trying to book something, but we thought availability would be limited, not non-existent. Dan tried for days, looking at hotel after hotel and resort after resort, in Germany, Austria, France, and Switzerland and found almost NOWHERE that had any rooms available. The few places that still had a room free about 6 weeks out were either rated poorly or were a long way from any skiing. We had pretty much given up on finding a place and had decided to do something completely different when Dan’s aunt Hedi in Austria took it upon herself to find us a place and spent who knows how many hours and days calling around. She finally stumbled upon a hotel with a cancellation in Kaprun, Austria and that is where we headed.

Now from our experience in Montana, certainly there are popular hotels or styles of room that book way in advance, but we have never had the problem where there are NO rooms available ANYWHERE. We are finding that much of Europe goes on vacation ALL AT THE SAME TIME, due to school breaks being scheduled on the same week. This was compounded this year in particular because Fasching (the German Mardi Gras celebration) coincided with winter break. So it seems that all of Europe was converging on the mountains to ski at the same time. 

When planning this trip, we were able to get fairly cheap plane tickets with a discount airline to fly as far as Munich, and then our plan was to rent a car and drive the 3ish hours to Kaprun. This seemed easy enough, and since there’s no airport very near Kaprun we would have had to find transportation to there from anywhere we flew, so we may as well fly to the cheapest spot. We considered taking a train from Munich but thought the car would provide us more flexibility.

The trouble started when our flight from Berlin to Munich was delayed by about an hour and a half for no apparent reason. We considered it only a small annoyance, since we weren’t worried about catching a connecting flight or train. The decision to drive vs. take a train seemed to have paid off. However, when we arrived in Munich and went to pick up our car, we found that after an hour of “no show”, the rental agency released our car to someone else. Dan feels certain that he gave them our flight number, but Enterprise claimed that they had no idea we were on a late-arriving flight. Immediately it called to mind the Seinfeld episode where Jerry tells the lady at the car rental counter that anyone can “take” a reservation but the most important thing is to “hold” the reservation. We went from rental counter to rental counter, waiting in line and then asking if there were any cars available, but you can imagine that if all the hotels are booked, all the cars are taken as well. Our only solace as we sat angrily waiting for Enterprise to scrounge up a car for us was in playing the video clip of the Seinfeld episode on YouTube, which we couldn’t help but laugh at: 

After an hour or so of waiting, eating some yucky sandwiches, and Dan complaining to Enterprise, they relented and gave us a brand new Range Rover, never been driven. We didn’t particularly want a brand new car; there is a great potential for expensive scratches or messes when traveling with two kids, but we didn’t have a choice. We headed on our way and all was fine until, about an hour from Kaprun, Dan and I were snacking on a bit of trail mix and Haley asked for some. No sooner had she taken a handful than she choked out “I’m throwing up!” and proceeded to vomit all over. Turns out she was carsick from looking at the iPad on the windy road, but had neglected to inform us of this in time for us to do anything about it. This was certainly not our first road trip with a carsick child, so we switched into that mode where, as parents, you realize that you are responsible for cleaning up whatever God-awful mess has been made. We scraped off Haley’s clothes as best we could in the snow by the side of the road and scrounged around in the car for something we could use to clean off the seat. This being a rental car, and this being only a short journey, there wasn’t much that we could use. I looked in the trash bin on the side of the road to see if there were any papers or napkins that weren’t too nasty that we could reuse. We considered sacrificing clean clothing from our suitcase to mop it up with. Finally Dan found a travel pack of Kleenex at the bottom of his backpack. Fun times. We finally rolled into town about 3 1/2 hours behind schedule.

A few positives from that unexpectedly long day of travel: 

1. We met Dan’s aunt and uncle, Hedi and Helmut, in Kaprun. We hadn’t seen them in several years and were so glad they made the drive to join us.

2. Our hotel was lovely. Our room had a balcony on the back that looked out over mountains and a pretty stream. It reminded us a lot of Montana. The window to the front of the room overlooked the town, with bright colored buildings and a pretty church - distinctly European-looking.

Our cute hotel next to the mountains

Comfortable (except for the beds) and spacious room

Gorgeous view of Kaprun with river and mountains from our
back deck

City view from the front window, centered on the white church

3. Dinner that first night was surprisingly exceptional. Eating at the hotel is different from our experience in the US, where hotel restaurants tend to be overpriced and often not that good. Many hotels here offer “half board”, which means breakfast and dinner are included in the price of the room. Our family had a table assigned to us in the restaurant, and they served us an exquisite 5 course meal! Salad bar, appetizer, soup, choice of 3 different entrees, and dessert. It was so so good. The waitstaff were dressed up in costumes for Fasching and our table was festively decorated.

Fancy place settings and decorated table with place card.
The kids were amazed by the number of forks and spoons
at our place setting! They had never seen a fancy table set before.

A sample dinner menu with the 5 courses. They would put the dinner menu
on our breakfast table each morning so we could plan our food choices
for the day and anticipate our amazing dinner awaiting us!

On the down side, I am hard pressed to remember a night when I have slept in a less comfortable bed. Our mattress seemed to have about a millimeter of padding on top of lumpy springs. Our pillows were wispy and thin, I’m really not sure what their purpose was. The room was very warm and the European fashion is to dress the bed with a fitted sheet (ours was scratchy) and a simple duvet on top. We roasted underneath the heavy duvets, but you couldn’t really kick it off because there was no lighter option, and it was too cold with nothing to cover you. I tossed and turned all night long trying to find a comfortable position, alternately soaked with sweat and freezing.

The next morning we were up early for our first day of skiing. 

Positives from Day 2:

1. The breakfast buffet at the hotel was exceptional. 6 large containers with different flavors of jam. 8 or 10 different bread choices, including 2 different kinds of coffee cake/breakfast bread fresh baked each day. 2 different choices of breakfast smoothies each day. 3 choices of yogurt flavors with bins of nuts, dried fruit, and granola for toppings. Fresh cheeses and sausages, if that’s your thing. We loaded our plates with yummy stuff and sat down at our table, and then discovered that they also come to your table and take your order for eggs made to order! Fried or scrambled eggs with bacon or cheese or mixed vegetables. I even discovered (too late - the last day) that they will make you an omelet. We couldn’t resist ordering eggs and eating them in addition to what we had already piled on our plates, so we all overate a bit that first day. I ordered coffee the first day and each morning thereafter, when we arrived for breakfast, there was a carafe of coffee and a pitcher of cream at my place already. We all ate so much food each morning.

2. Glorious weather!! Sun, beautiful sun. Blue blue skies. We soaked up as much sun as we could, being so sun-deprived in Berlin. It was warm too - the days started out just below freezing and ended up in the mid-40’s. It was like spring skiing, which was fine with me because I hate to ski when it’s freezing.

Helmut, Dan and the kids

3. Amazing scenery. It was truly gorgeous. Of course the mountains reminded us of home and fed our souls. We truly don’t understand why anyone with a choice would choose to live anywhere without mountains. :) We seem to be in the minority with that opinion though.

Alps everywhere!

4. Yummy lunch in the sun. We had been told to try the Kaiserschmarrn, an Austrian delicacy sort of like cut up pancakes with icing and powdered sugar, served with applesauce or plum compote. It got its name from the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, who was a big fan of the dish. It was a treat to have this for lunch with a beer in the bright sunshine!

mmmmmm, Kaiserschmarrn.....

And the downsides:

1. The weather, both a positive and a negative. Sun and warmth means the snow was not very good. It was icy in the morning and like mashed potatoes in the afternoon. They hadn’t had any snow in days, so there was no fresh powder anywhere. The resorts had to use snow machines to get enough coverage on the slopes. Still, that first day wasn’t bad and we enjoyed our day.

2. Lack of variety. Kaprun has several smaller ski areas, and your regional ski pass is good at any of the resorts. So there’s not one large connected ski area, you have to choose one place to ski for the day. On our first day we skied the small family ski area, Maiskogel. It was low elevation and easy to get to, right in town, but it only had a few ski runs. We are certainly spoiled because I was a little bit bored skiing the same run many times.

3. Adjusting to the European grading and navigation system. US ski resorts have a grading system of green (easy), blue (intermediate) and black (difficult), plus double black for super hard. Austria has a similar system, with the colors swapped a little: blue (easy), red (intermediate) and black (difficult). But the ratings seem to be much less consistent, even at the same ski complex. We tried to ski the red, which should have been well within everyone’s capability, but this particular one was pretty difficult and Haley freaked out and threw a tantrum, saying that it was too hard for her. We had to split up so that someone could inch their way down with Haley and the others could ski, and then swap off later. Unfortunately, this early bad experience pretty much soured Haley on the red runs, so someone had to stick to blue runs with Haley for most of the vacation. We found that some blues were quite challenging, some reds seemed like blacks, and Dan thought the blacks were more like reds and had trouble finding terrain to challenge him. At the same time, we had a hard time understanding the ski maps and a hard time following the ski runs. In the US the runs have names and are clearly marked at each possible place to turn off. At this ski resort each run simply has a number that is marked at the top of the ski lift. You head in the direction of the number and hope to find your way down! There are some places along the way where you can find the number, but we spent a lot of our time just skiing down the hill in confusion, wondering where we were going to end up. 

After skiing we went to the Tauern Spa, where Hedi and Helmut were staying (they also found a last-minute cancellation room). 

The steaming blue part is an outdoor hot tub and you can just barely see a person
leaning over the edge - Hedi!

We had missed our annual trip to Fairmont Hot Springs over the Christmas holidays, so we bought a day pass to this hot spring resort. It had big pools, indoor and outdoor, bubbling massage jets, a water cave structure, fountains, etc. The kids had a blast and it was just what we needed to relax and let off some steam. 

Huge glass windows frame the mountains outside

Helmut and Hedi had a great time too

Hedi and Helmut even watched the kids while Dan and I borrowed their wristbands and went to the enormous sauna complex. Europeans are big on saunas and many people plan vacations around spa complexes. This one had about 8 or 10 different rooms, each with a different temperature and/or attraction. There was a steam room infused with yummy aromatherapy. There was a warm stone room, where the benches are made of stone to warm your muscles. There were varying temperatures of dry sauna rooms, some with special scents. There was a Finnish sauna (super hot!) which was completely packed because there was a performance by the towel guy. This is an odd thing we had heard about. The sauna was too full for us to get into (thank goodness because I think we would have suffocated), but we watched the towel performance from the sauna across the hall. This guy comes into the small room and waves his towel around in elaborate towel movements. Back and forth like he’s bullfighting, swirling it around his head like a Pittsburgh Steelers Terrible Towel, whipping it out towards the people so it cracks like a whip. Periodically he uses it to wipe the sweat from his body, then he ceremoniously fans everyone with it. These Finnish saunas are about 90 degrees Celsius (194 Fahrenheit), so stirring the air almost burns you with the hot air moving past you. Everyone applauds when the performance is over. We found it a little comical, the packed rows of naked people (most saunas don’t allow clothing) being fanned by the sweaty man with the towel, but of course Europeans take their saunas very seriously and to them there is nothing funny or unusual about it. There were cold showers and a bin full of ice that you could smear over yourself if you overheated.

We returned to our hotel for another excellent dinner of tasty soup, baked fish, and custard with whipped cream for dessert.

The next day we went to the Kitzsteinhorn to ski. This is a glacier way up on the mountain which is accessed by two long gondola rides. It’s the highest ski area in the Salzburg region. It seems that the entire population of Europe chose this particular ski resort on this particular day. We took a packed bus from Helmut’s hotel (he skied with us the first two days) and arrived with throngs of other skiers. We stood in a line as long as a Disneyland line to get on the first gondola, but unfortunately the lines here aren’t managed like American lines. The lines at the Austrian resorts were pretty much every man for himself. The line was very wide and there was no clear priority of which side got to go first, so it happened that the left side of the line would swing around and people would crowd in and not allow the right side of the line to turn the corner each time the line switchbacked. We were passed by dozens, scores, hundreds of people whose only thought was to get up the mountain first. Lines seem to bring out the worst in people and there was pushing, shoving, cutting, bumping of skis. I even saw a group of adults go under the rope at a switchback and move in front of an entire switchback full of people. In order to have any hope of reaching the gondola ourselves we were forced to change our behavior to protect our space, hold our ground, elbow out those who would cut in front. It wasn’t a nice way to start the day. Ditto for the second gondola ride. 

Finally we reached the top. Wow, what a view. Being atop the glacier was stunning and the weather couldn’t have been better. But we were appalled by the crowds. The glacier was much bigger than the small place we skied the day before, so we tried to spread out and escape the throng. But you couldn’t get away. Everywhere we went was like a river of people continually streaming down the mountain. There was almost nowhere to go to have your own space. I think this is normal for Europeans so it was probably a glorious day for everyone else, but we felt cramped and crowded and afraid of all the people zipping by us. A tentative skier like Haley needs space to operate and doesn’t always (or ever) make predictable turns, and we were constantly fearful that someone would come zipping down the hill and crash into her. A skier like Carter needs space because he has a tendency to overestimate his ability to turn or stop when he wants to, so we don’t trust his ability to navigate through a crowd. We thought about putting the kids in ski school but Helmut really wanted to ski with them, plus the ratio was 10-1 in the classes, which we thought was really too many people for the kids to get much individual instruction. We found ourselves spending a lot of time standing still looking backward, waiting for a break in the constant downhill traffic, and then when there was a short pause saying “Go! Go now! You have some space, go!” As I already said, the ski runs were hard to follow and they intersected each other all over the place, often without signs posting a warning. So you would be skiing down and all of a sudden someone would come flying at you from a diagonal direction. I missed getting plowed into once by about a millisecond. We were all ready to leave by about 2:00 and were thankful to be escaping without injury.

Chaos!!

Crowds disembarking from the gondola

Waiting...

By our third day of skiing, the snow was getting pretty grim. We skied Schmittenhöhe Zell Am See which was a large ski complex just a bit down the road. After three warm sunny days with no new snow, the day pretty much started with mashed potatoey snow, and by the afternoon it was chunky and even almost bare in some places. Again, it was a beautiful day with beautiful views.
Again it was way too crowded. This resort had a small terrain park, which was fun for the kids. Carter got to do the crazy jumps he likes to do and go up and down small hills and through tunnels. But after lunch we all decided we were done with skiing, and didn’t want to try again the next day. We stopped at a party hut on the way down and had a drink and listened to Austrian music in the sun for a while.

Party central

Soaking up the sun on the swing

Back at our hotel, Dan and I left the kids in the room reading and went downstairs to the hotel’s small sauna, where there was a cooling whirlpool, a steam room, a warm sauna and a hot sauna, plus a “relaxing room” with a row of waterbeds to lie on and read or sleep. Nice!

Ready for the sauna!

We enjoyed yet another amazing dinner, complete with a fabulous dessert buffet.

So many choices! 

Beautiful and delicious desserts

It is so hard to come back home and cook for myself and wash all the dishes after a marvelous break from those responsibilities!

Our plan for Saturday was to have an easy morning, followed by a leisurely drive to Munich. We were going to tour an ancient monastery and then visit a thermal spa/waterpark in the area. But we got stuck in awful traffic. Our 2 1/2 hour drive turned into 5 as we inched forward on the road. As frustrating as that was, at least once we got on the autobahn we could steadily move, albeit slower than the posted speed limit. Meanwhile, the southbound traffic on the autobahn was at a complete standstill for most of our journey. Those people weren’t going anywhere, poor souls. 

We got to Munich late, but still decided to try the waterpark. Just like everywhere on this trip, I didn’t know that so many humans could live on this earth, much less all be at the same waterpark on the same evening. This place was so packed full of people that the big pool was just a sea of floating heads.

This photo makes it look sparse

It was an interesting place, though. They had two enormous pools, each with their own entertainment. One pool had water aerobics, followed by a really cool African drum band. The other pool was a wave pool with gently lapping waves and everyone was bobbing up and down on foam noodles while 3 people on the stage put on a miniature performance of The Lion King. But by far the biggest attraction for us was an enormous inner dome that was crisscrossed by about 20 different waterslides. Some were short and fast, some long and slower. Some we had to climb flight after flight of stairs and started the slide at dizzying heights.

Indoor waterslide park

There were slides for all ages and, despite the crowds, the lines weren’t too awful as long as you stayed away from the most popular ones. Typically Haley’s choices are limited with any amusement park rides because of her size, but here there were several really fun ones that she could do. It was fun for us all to ride together and for her to be included. I enjoyed getting to ride the slides too; often the Mom doesn’t get to participate in the games, it seems. We stayed our 4 hour limit and didn’t get back to our hotel until around 9 p.m.

Almost as soon as we arrived in Berlin I saw advertisements that Disney on Ice was going to perform “Frozen” in an ice arena in Berlin. I thought that was something Haley would love, so I planned way ahead and bought tickets and planned to give them to her for Christmas. Well, that turned into a debacle. Somehow when we moved from our apartment to our house, the tickets didn’t come with us, or at least I could never find them. I gave her an “IOU” for Christmas and kept thinking they would turn up as the weeks went by and we unpacked more and more things, but they never did. I’m afraid that maybe we put them into the paper recycling sometime before we left the apartment. Then a few weeks ago we realized that we had accidentally booked our plane tickets back from Munich on the same day as the Frozen show, and too late in the day to actually attend. Ugh! We looked into changing Haley’s and my plane tickets, but we had bought the cheap non-refundable non-changeable ones from the discount airline. I apologized profusely to Haley and promised to make it up to her and began contacting the ticket company, in limited German, to see if we could get the tickets reissued so I could at least sell them (it was of course, by this time, a sold-out show). 10 days or so went by without a word from them, so I enlisted the help of a German-speaking parent from the school to call them and try to get an answer. He called dozens of times and always got a busy signal. So he too sent them an email. Finally I received an answer that while they couldn’t reissue the tickets, they could send me a voucher that I could use, with my ID, to get into the show. So much for selling them - that meant that only I could use the tickets. 

So yesterday, we decided that instead of spending the day in Munich touring today, Haley and I would go back to Berlin in time for the show. We forfeited our plane tickets and bought one-way train tickets. We got up at 5:20 this morning and are currently meandering through the German countryside on our 7 hour journey to Berlin. One lesson from this trip is that train travel seems more reliable and is definitely more pleasant that travel by plane or car. So if in the future there is only a 2 or 3 hour difference between travel time for the two modes of transport, we will choose train. The seats are comfortable, there is plenty of space, the views are interesting, there are power outlets for our electronics, it’s easy to bring your own food, you don’t have to arrive hours early. (post script update: Haley LOVED the show and I'm so glad we got to see it.)

Another lesson from this trip is that we are simply not “crowd” people. Of course we know this, and so we often make choices with our vacations that take us out of the most crowded areas. The problem with this vacation was that it seems that if you want to go skiing in Europe there is no way to escape the crowds. It’s against the law in Germany to take your kids out of school for a vacation, so you can’t choose an off-week for your ski trip. We asked at the hotel when is the best time to come when it is less crowded, and naturally they said “January or March”, when no family with school-aged children can take a vacation. We have to do some serious thinking when we get home about whether we want to ski next year or whether we want to wait a couple of years for Montana skiing. Because if we want to avoid this year’s availability problem, we need to book next year’s vacation NOW. People plan so far ahead here! It’s definitely not what we’re used to. Carter, especially, loves to ski, so I hate to take that away from him. But Dan and I may not be able to maintain our sanity with the cost and the crowds and the delays. One thing we realized is that in the past we have only “done” Europe for a few weeks at a time. We have handled the crowds and cost for a couple of weeks on vacation and then returned home to our simple and peaceful lives. Now that we live here, we have been “doing” Europe for months. We have managed to find some personal space in Berlin, and our home certainly provides a nice retreat from the hustle and bustle. But crowds are just a way of life here and we will either have to get used to it or despise our vacations or go someplace that nobody else wants to go. The number of interesting things to see here is practically unlimited, so we will probably lean towards option 3.

While this vacation doesn’t rank in the top half of our favorite family vacations, I don’t want to seem overly negative or ungrateful. We had amazing food and gorgeous weather. We got to do a snow activity, which we have all been missing since our departure from Missoula. We got to spend time with family. We got to swim. We got to try out European saunas. Every day we are learning and making memories and that's what we're here to do!