Getting the kids on skis

 

When we lived in North Carolina, we were about six hours away from the closest mountain.  Luckily, we lived close to the beach, which is a pretty fair trade-off. 

Now that we are in southern Germany, only an hour from the Alps, we knew that skiing was something that we would have to teach the kids.  We headed to the ski shop to stock up on all the necessary gear, and headed down to one of the smaller ski areas just across the Austrian border, called Jungholz. 

 

We rented our skis right at the bottom of the parking lot.  It was a bit overwhelming trying to muddle through the rental process, since our German is still terrible, and I still can never remember our European shoe sizes. 

 

 The kids has a good first experience.  Ryan was a bit intimidated at first, but he was having a great time just going up and down the kids slope.  The only way I could get Ryan off his skis was to lure him with schnitzel and French fries!  As we expected, Meredith got tired quickly, and Dan and I barely even got our skis on.  Next time we will not bother renting skis for ourselves!

The lifts closed at four o'clock, so we headed over to do some sledding and playing in the snow before heading home. 



 

Luckily we were able to introduce the kids to skiing this year, and hopefully by next year we will be able to jump right in when ski season rolls around.  We are still going to try to go a couple of more times this season, but there hasn't been as much snow as usual here.  Ironically there has been more snow in coastal North Carolina this year than we have had here in Ulm!  Luckily we can just zip down to the Alps and find snow there!