The Things We Do for Love: Passo del Tonale

As my devoted blog reader - hi Dudu - has surmised - it's been a bit of of a $&it show around here. As travel just adds to the chaos, I planned on sitting out this winter break. The boys would go skiing in Italy with friends and Carmen and I would hold down the fort in Berlin. Unfortunately our ski buddies couldn't join. In a moment of great selflessness, I told Paul I'd come on the trip to keep him company.

I, blissfully, didn't have anything to do with the planning of this trip. Passo del Tonale is rather isolated. But, it's also the most sure place for snow in Italy. Generally speaking, skiing is cheaper in Europe than it is in the US. Also, vacation time is much more generous. As such, taking two travel days on an end of six ski days is doable.

This was the first time we stayed at a hotel on the mountain. It is so worth it to have a magic carpet outside the door for:

Snow biking

Snow napping

Most hotels and ski schools are set-up for guests to stay Saturday to Saturday. This is especially helpful as it takes a couple days to figure out where and how to get the kids where they need to be. On the first day, the ski school did a little test for all the kids to place them in the ski class they would be the rest of the week. After the ski school test, Crosby said he wasn't feeling well. I talked about altitude and how I have a little bit of a headache, yada yada, but if you read my last post - you know we got a stomach bug for the forth ski trip in a row.  

Unfortunately Crosby missed most of his ski lessons. But, we found out that private ski lessons in Italy are half the price of Germany/Austria - 43 Euros/$50 an hour. We did one hour for Carmen and Crosby to try and catch them up to the rest of their classes. 

The ski school also offered a couple add ons like trying snowboarding. Cros was too sick to go so I joined Hugo and four other little kids for a lesson.

No pictures please, I'm busy being awesome.

I remembered at the last minute that both Hugo and I are goofy. It was too late to change up the bindings. I think he might have found snowboarding more interesting if he had the right set-up. That's one way to keep him on skis. 

The next day the ski school offered a sunset ski party for kids to chase the mascot around the hill. 

Cros was just coming out of feeling awful for this.

Carmen's mascot chase was on the bunny hill.

We also embraced the European ski culture of not skiing until we dropped every day. Honestly, we need to do a lot more than get 10,000 steps a day to be able to ski eight hours. By the forth day, we got to ski together for a couple hours while two kids were in lessons and one was recovering in the hotel room. 

It was at this point in the trip that I declared that my general travel goals are for a) no one to sustain permanent injury and b) for everyone to like each other at the end of the trip. Or to copy my friend Amy's March Madness turned life motto "Survive and Advance". These trips are hopefully an investment in future ski trips. It was icing on the cake that Carmen found a love for skiing. 

Our pro-move this trip was renting a sled for our gear:

I mean the sled is for the rental gear, because for our bags we'd need a snow cat:

Two large 20K/45 pound bags, three cabin 10K/20 pound bags, one travel stroller, and five backpacks. 

Would we go back to Passo del Tonale? Maybe in a couple years. The 7:30 pm dinner start-time was hard. We had one or more kids go to bed before dinner on half the nights. The upside of skiing in Italy is the Apres Ski music is much better than Schlagger (German hits).  Our little ski dancer cannot resist a good beat.