Christmas Vacation

We decided to spend Christmas skiing in Garmisch, Germany this year at an Armed Forces resort called Edelweiss. When we've gone up there before, we've driven up to Verona on the first day, then driven the rest of the way the next day. This time, we drove all the way to Innsbruck on the first day, and visited the Christmas Markets there that night, before finishing the drive to Garmisch the next day.

We checked into the hotel, and went over to the ski resort to get fitted for all of our rental equipment; we didn't know that all of the ski pants and jackets would be included with our equipment rental, so we'd brought (or specially purchased) all that stuff with us. We had signed up for five days of lessons for all 4 of us, and were able to get Palmer into snowboarding lessons (rather than skiing lessons).

Becca and I had signed up for two different levels of intermediate instruction, but then they combined both of our groups together for the first couple of days. The two instructors for our group spent the first day and a half evaluating everyone then divided the group in half, in line with their observations, rather than having everyone self-evaluate themselves into the advanced or intermediate groups. Becca and I ended up being put together, into the advanced half of the group.

We skied for the whole 5 days; quite an achievement, since neither one of us had spent any significant amount of time on skis for years. On the fourth day, we ended up skiing the entire mountain, top to bottom - twice in a row. I could barely move the next day, but at the time, we were quite proud of ourselves. On the final day, our instructor gave us a choice (as a group) if we wanted to have the traditional "Last Day Race"; we decided as a group that we'd rather continue to ski and work on our technique. 

While we were happily being beat up by our instructor, Cori was had her own ski vacation experience. She'd never been on skis before, so she spent the first couple of days on a small rope tow behind the chalet, what they euphemistically call the "Back Yard". She was not very happy with her instructor, and felt that the expectations that Mary Kate (her instructor) put on her were not very realistic: "She wants me to turn!" We explained to her that we were all working on learning to turn, and that this was a major part of learning to ski. Becca and I agreed that some of the conflict might have stemmed from some sort of harmonics created by hair color - "Not Ashley" and Cori both had long red hair, and the tempers to match. On Wednesday, she finally made it up the mountain (to where the real slopes were). Thursday afternoon (after Becca and I skied the whole mountain, top to bottom, twice) Becca met up with Cori up on the slopes and asked her if she wanted to ski together. Becca told Cori to pick one of the runs that she was most comfortable on, and Cori guided her to a run that Becca and I had been doing all week long, working on technique. Becca and I were pretty impressed about that. On the final day, her class had a race, and Cori got second place in her group. She had a blast overall, after the initial personality clash with Not Ashley.

We'd explained to Palmer that snowboarding is much more difficult than skiing, and that he would need to be quite patient throughout the week. When we were signing him up, the lead instructor who was building the class rosters reiterated that, and told him that he'd spend most of the first couple of days on his butt. Palmer decided that between skiing and snowboarding, he would still prefer snowboarding. It took him a couple of days to get comfortable, but on Wednesday afternoon, his class went up the real mountain. There were a couple of times where he got frustrated and started building snowmen, and once he plowed into a protective fence, knocking it over; by and large though, he had a good time. The chairlift and slopes were a bit more crowded on Friday, and Palmer's class wasn't able to get to the area where the class races were being held - they ended up skipping the race. Palmer was a little bit bummed about that, but we were all proud of his accomplishments over the week.

While all of our days were full of skiing, we still had our evenings free, and we tried to make the most of them. The "Candle-lit Gorge Tour" had been cancelled due to warm temperatures, but everything else worked out okay. Christmas Eve, we had a traditional Christmas Eve dinner at a local Chinese restaurant - we got a kick out of that, and spent most of dinner telling the kids about the movie "A Christmas Story". We brought along "The Night Before Christmas"; one of our family traditions is for me to read it to the kids on Christmas Eve. We went to the balcony overlooking the lobby and sat next to a Christmas tree that Edelweiss had set up there for me to read it to them (that's the night that you all saw the picture of). 

We had Christmas dinner at the resort, at a buffet they had set up with all the traditional Christmas dishes. 

One night, we had dinner in a traditional Bavarian "Gasthaus". We had made reservations, and were a bit disappointed to find 2 people already seated at our (6 seat) table when we got there. We didn't make any waves, and it turns out that that's just how they do it there. Our dinner companions were Germans who were visiting from Cologne (a city farther north in Germany). Their English was almost fluent, and we talked with them throughout most of the meal. They agreed with us that the Bavarians have some odd traditions. Part of the Gasthaus environment is the music, the dancing (in this case, it was teen-aged boys in lederhosen doing some sort of jig, which involved slapping their thighs pretty regularly), the singing. Altogether, a pretty entertaining evening.

We took a tour in a nearby town of a monastery, a woodcarver, and a cheese factory - that was pretty cool. We bought a bunch of carved wood stuff on that tour, but not much else.

Our big purchase for the trip: I finally got a cuckoo clock - I've wanted to get one for the whole time we've been here. I've posted a video on Facebook, and I'm pretty sure that anyone who wants to see it has already done so - if not, look for the video below.

That's all for now, but there will be another update within the next couple of weeks.