Grace is a better skier than me!

We've been having a fair amount of health issues in our household (or is that apartmenthold or flathold here?), but in between, Grace and I have managed to get out twice to ski. And let me tell you, I could not be prouder -- she is doing great!

The first ski outing was to a place called Klippitztörl, which is a bit further than Hebalm, where the kids learned to ski. We took something called the Schnee Bus (snow bus), which is a bus trip organized by the local sporting goods giant, Giga Sports. They negotiate a group rate for the lift ticket and share the cost of the bus. It's a pretty good deal, but Grace wasn't too happy when she found out the bus left at 7:30a from a mall that was a 20-minute tram ride away. But she was in good sprits for the 1:15 bus drive out into the Austrian mountains. And I was glad someone else was driving as we hit some pretty deep snow about 40 minutes into the drive.

When we pulled into the parking lot there is one hill right in front of you. Grace looked up and said, "is that a black hill?" For those of you that don't ski, ski hills are rated in terms of difficulty. In Austria, "bunny hills" (and yes, they call it that even though "bunny" and "hill" are not the same in English and German!) are not rated, typically. Blue is the rating for an "intermediate hill," whereas red is for "difficult," and black is for "expert." Anyway, in ski school Grace had only skied on a pretty easy and short bunny hill.

A horrible iPhone picture of Grace atop the Blue bunny hill.

Anyway, after renting our equipment, changing our clothes, and getting our pass from the bus driver, we checked out that map. That "black hill" turned out to be the bunny hill! And it was rated "blue." So, needless to say, Grace was a little intimidated heading to the top of the hill on the "tow line." But we skied down without incident, with me trailing behind her, just in case. After about five or six runs she said, "I think I have this figured out, you don't need to go behind me anymore." And after 10 runs, she said, after stating multiple times that she would "NEVER" ride a chair lift (too dangerous), "let's try the chair lift for a real blue."



Well, she fell a few times, but nothing serious and she just did great, what can I say! And by now I was starting to realize something that has limited my skiing by learning later in life ... I have an internal governor that says, "that's pretty fast, you might want to slow down." But she doesn't have that. So, while I try to make turns going down the hill to check my speed, little Ms. Speed Demon gets tired of making turns and just goes all out at times -- and then waits for me to catch up! This was especially true the next week ... but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Anyway, due to a language mixup with the bus driver, we couldn't get our food off of the bus and so ended up skiing pretty much non-stop from 9:30 to 4:00. I was pretty tired at the end, but Grace never flagged. We ended up with like 30 runs on the bunny hill and 2 runs on the "real blue" hill complete with not-so-scary (according to Grace now) chairlift rides up. With the bus ride back and the tram from then, I think it was 6:30p or so when we arrived at home, full of stories of our great adventure.

So, given that was one long day, we were happy the next week when my friend, Jörg, offered to drive to our destination, Präbichl, and he didn't want to pick us up until 10:30a! The drive to
Präbichl was a little longer and this time we were heading northwest out of Graz, right into the heart of the Austrian Alps. I tell you, this is a beautiful country and where we went skiing was breathtaking. And with over 2m of snow on the ground (think 6 feet or so), we had ideal skiing conditions.

We bought a noon-4p-close pass and hit the slopes soon after noon. We took one run on the flattest, widest, and longest bunny hill I've ever seen and Grace declared herself ready for the chair lift. She was a little intimidated by the fact that is was a 4-person chair, but quickly got the hang of it and we enjoyed the 5-minute ride to the top. We were a little confused where to go, but our friend Jörg convinced us we were ready for Run #1. I thought I saw a red sign at the top, but thought, "no, he wouldn't head us down a red to start ... Grace has never skied a red run before." Well, I was wrong ... he did! We made it down in excellent fashion and we headed right back up. This time, Run #2, which had a blue sign. Now Grace realized she had skied a red run. If you thought I was proud of her, then you have no idea how proud she was of herself! And, as I alluded to earlier, there were times she must have waited 2 or 3 full minutes for me and Jörg to catch up (Jörg was hanging back with me; he's an excellent skier, often heading out days at a time as a teenager hiking up mountains with seal skins on his skis and then skiing down in one long day). And then we discovered Run #3 that ended with a long stretch that was parallel to the bunny hill. We ended up racing that, flat out as fast as we could go and Grace won a couple of times!

I'll end just by saying that Grace has a long way to go to have that effortless Austrian downhill style (and she still skis without poles), but it is just AMAZING at how comfortable she is on skis and how much she is enjoying this! And keep in mind: She is 8-years old and only had about 6-7 hours of instruction before these two outings. When I think how much confidence this is building in her, I'm just overjoyed. And I have to say that I like having a "ski buddy" to hang out with :-)

Russ