Skiing in Zillertal (Austria)

This year we returned to our favourite family skiing hotel in the Zillertal, Tirol, Austria ... only about 2 hours drive from home.

Our friends from Munich Jean-Christophe and Stéphanie with their daughter Louise joined us at the hotel for the week. For the first weekend only another family joined us : Rene and Corinne with Lena, Leo and Luis.

This is the fourth time that we have stayed at this hotel and we know the area quite well. One of our regular activities is the sledge ride down a 7.5 km toboggan run at the Hainzeberg. Mattéo and Alister shared a sledge and went down with confidence, hit a large area of sheet ice and left the narrow path and plunged into a steep wooded ravine. Alister tumbled 5 metres down and heavily bruised his left side and heard Mattéo screaming with fright. He had hit a tree further up and had sustained some head injuries - resulting in an alarming amount of blood. We carefully walked down the rest of the route and amazingly flagged down a passing ambulance returning from delivering a patient nearby. We were well looked after and the duty doctor in Zell tidied up the wounds, made a total of about 12 stitches to three cuts on the scalp and took a couple of X-rays for safety. Mattéo was extremely brave and took all the treatment like a very big boy.

Whilst the stitches prevented Mattéo from swimming in the hotel pool, thankfully there was no problem in getting back on the ski slopes and he was soon up on the mountain with a group of 8 youngsters and an instructor, Richard.

Juliette also built upon her previous week of lessons and continued with a small group and an instructor on the slope next to the hotel.

They were each very keen to ski and during the week there were two sets of slalom races (one up on the mountain and one by the hotel). Alister and Delphine of course went to each race and were proud to see Mattéo and Juliette each on the podium receiving a gold medal for first place in their respective group races!!!

As for the adults, we made the most of the fantastic sunny weather and great snow and skied the whole region. The hotels health spa let us relax while the children enjoyed post ski activities with the child minders.

January

We only had a sprinkle of snow this month, but it was enough to have some fun in the snow. We all went to a small ski slope near Munich and Mattéo showed that he had not lost his skills even after 2 years away from the slopes. A few weeks later, Juliette went skiing every day for a week with her Kindergarten. At the end of the week (whilst poor Mattéo was still at school), Delphine and Alister went to see how she had progressed during her first week. There was a short race for her group of ten girls and Juliette came away with the bronze medal (see the film below).

We also had some nice walks by a local river (Mangfall) and Mattéo continued with his indoor soccer tournaments. He started a new team sport - but we'll talk about that in a later Blog.

Alister was pleased to be able to swim a kilometre of front crawl - another sign that the shoulder is really almost back to normal!!