Ski Holidays - Planneralm, Austria

Faschingsferien!
Germany has it's own variation of Carnival, and it's called Fasching. Depending on what part of Germany you're in, it's either a really big deal, or not so much. In Cologne and surrounding areas, it's huge, and they celebrate it for weeks with lots of parties and extravagant costumes with the culmination of a giant festival at the end of Fasching. Here in Munich, it's not as popular as other areas but each school still has a whole-day event where kids and parents come together in costume, and celebrate with a giant carnival with lots of music, dancing, games and delicious treats! But if you ask me, the best part of Fasching is that the kids get a week off of school!! So naturally, we headed to the Alps for a week of skiing!!
Let me just say, that even though the traffic was terrible, and at times we were almost at a standstill on the Autobahn because almost everyone else in Europe was doing the exact same thing, I will never be jaded by the experience, and will always appreciate the time that we are able to share as a family and the adventures that we have been having!
What made this week even more memorable, is that we were joined by our relatives. My aunt Sonny, cousin Selma (7 mths pregnant at the time) and her husband Sebastian (Basti), and his parents Michael and Barbara (Babsi), all met us in the mountains and we stayed across the hall from each other in the same chalet. And for a change, I didn't do any of the cooking! My Aunt is an amazing cook, and did all of the food preparations and planning well in advance of our trip, so that all we ever had to do was take off our ski boots and sit down to eat :)
So we knew that we were going to have lots of great company and delicious food, but we had no idea that we were also going to experience some of the greatest snow and skiing conditions of our lives!! Before we arrived, it basically snowed for almost 2 days straight, and then it snowed again throughout the following evening, and then again 2 nights later, to the point where we had powder like conditions on most of the runs!  It was amazing!! And it was never cold (minus 5ish). Every morning we bundled up, like good Canadians do, and after a couple of runs everyone was looking to shed all of the layers that I was diligently forcing them to wear. Luckily, our chalet was only 50 metres or so away from the lift, so this was hardly an inconvenience.
And due to the fact that we were never cold, we never really had to combat cabin fever. So when we weren't skiing, we could play outside in the snow, either sledding, digging tunnels or even finding cars that were buried under the snow! Seriously. For days we thought we were playing on a snowplow drift that had been covered in fresh snow. Can you imagine our shock when we discovered that we were actually climbing on someone's van, that was actually covered/buried in snow right in front of our chalet?? Needless to say, we played a little further away from our front door after that...

Before you check out our latest video, I would like to add one more thing: We are clearly not professional sport videographers. We're also not professional skiers! While we would love to show you some amazing Warren Miller like shots, it is not easy to ski and and take videos with a tiny "point and shoot" pocket camera at the same time. Nonetheless, we had a lot of fun, even though we couldn't take videos of some of the more challenging runs. Who knows, maybe one day, we'll actually get a proper "Go" camera :)

Enjoy!