I’ve always appreciated how logical German is. Words like Handschuh (glove = "hand shoe"), Zahnfleisch (gums = "tooth flesh"), and Fingerspitzengefühl (intuition and tact = "fingertip feeling") are just a few examples. But every once in a while, the literal can also be poetic, as in today’s word: Himmelsrichtungen. Literally "directions of heaven," the word refers to the cardinal directions: north, south, east, and west.
Well, we definitely covered all four directions last week with our epic drive to the French Alps. We decided to take two days to get there via Switzerland, stopping first in Bern then overnight in Lausanne. I’d booked a highly rated, reasonably priced (red flag!) hotel online, which turned out to be attached to a hospital!! When I approached the reception desk to ask about parking and spotted a frail old woman with a walker and slippers shuffling toward an elevator that led directly to the ward, I started to feel queasy. Thankfully, they let us cancel our reservation at the last minute, and, after driving in circles through Lausanne, we were lucky to find two lovely adjoining rooms at the Alpha Palmiers hotel.
The next morning, we lingered over a leisurely breakfast before heading off to the beautiful and fascinating Olympic Museum overlooking Lake Geneva—highly recommend! Next, we were off to the mountains!
GPS is a helpful invention, but it’s not exactly a godsend. We learned this the hard way en route to Valmorel. After making yet another U-turn and paying what felt like the 17th toll, we realized that sometimes an internal compass gets you closer to heaven than any piece of technology. At some point, we simply trusted our gut and started ascending a winding mountain road, hoping our destination would eventually appear.
It did! Club Med Valmorel was indeed heavenly—at least once we passed the purgatory phase of check-in, with its parking permits, passport checks, wristbands, and hungry, stir-crazy kids whining nonstop. We were all a little overwhelmed by the chaos at first and were definitely the only German-Canadians at the resort. We’d inadvertently booked our trip during the last week of school holidays for both France and Belgium, so the place was packed with French- and Dutch-speaking families.
Everything got easier as we got to know the people in our ski group: the boisterous Belgian couple with their smiley teenage son, the jovial Scotsman, a pair of Ozzie expats based in Portugal, and a lovely British woman flying solo with her two young daughters (her husband had been called back to work unexpectedly, so she was grateful for the adult chairlift chats).
The last (and, come to think of it, first) time Erol and I went skiing together was while we were living in Tel Aviv. We’d booked an all-inclusive trip through an Israeli company and spent a wonderful few days in Austria’s Zillertal, surrounded by swarthy, stocky Israeli men on bromance ski trips. I kept teasing Erol, “Come on, we’re in Austria—it’s about time you learned Hebrew!” I still remember splurging on ski clothes, reassuring each other that it was a wise investment because, surely, we’d be skiing together every year.
That was eleven years ago. Ah, the time warp that is parenthood. People kept telling me skiing is like riding a bike, but I wasn’t sure whether or not to believe them.
Club Med is cleverly designed in such a way that parents can, if they wish, avoid their children entirely. Unfortunately, given Leo’s fraught acclimatization to his Waldkindergarten in Freiburg, he was particularly clingy. It didn’t help that the Mini Club staff – all clad in slightly creepy animal costumes – lost both his skis and his goggles before he even hit the bunny slope on day one. Needless to say, he did not trust these zoological caregivers with thick French accents (can you blame him?), and I had to quite literally peel him off my leg, screaming, before sprinting out of the Mini Club in a sweat. He refused to ski for most of the week and would only agree to private instruction. Sometimes I think my delicate little silver spoon boy should have been born to 19th-century Russian aristocrats—then at least he’d speak French.
As for me, the skiing did come back—along with a renewed admiration for sexy ski instructors, most of whom were half my age. When I asked Adrian of Albertville what year his hometown hosted the Olympics, he said, “It was 1999, but I wasn’t born yet.” Cue the cougar jokes! The French variety of ski instructor is, as you might expect, even saucier than the Canadian kind I lusted after in my youth, thanks to the accent and their charming habit of carrying a flask of Génépi, a sweet-sour alpine liqueur. They casually pull it from their ski jacket breast pocket and offer it to you as liquid courage at the top of particularly steep slopes. Naturally, I giggled and obliged.
But for all my flirtations with nostalgia, my body was quick to remind me that I am not, in fact, 16 anymore. My lower back ached for most of the trip, and at one point, I made the questionable decision to go off a ski jump (stupid), only to land poorly and strain my calf muscle. I used to be able to survive on Kit Kat bars and Dr. Pepper, stay up half the night, and still ski all day without missing a beat.
And yet… I’ve still got it! I loved being in the Alps—that sweeping view of Mont Blanc; the thrill of standing at a peak where France, Italy, and Switzerland converge; the quiet pleasure of being pulled up the mountain on a drag lift, leaning back just enough to soak in the sun and crisp alpine air. Some moments were truly glorious. I was reminded of my own joy and passion, completely separate from parenthood. And when Erol and I weren’t tag-teaming to manage Leo’s meltdowns, we even got to ski together—something we hadn’t done in over a decade.
At the same time, I had the privilege of watching Rafi fall in love with skiing, his confidence growing with every run. This was especially clear on our last day, when we hired our group instructor, Antoine (a fourth-generation ski instructor—we even bumped into both Papa and Maman on the slopes), for a family lesson. We all cheered Leo on as he finally—albeit belatedly—got the hang of it, and celebrated Rafi’s increasingly daredevilish ways.
As for the après-ski, Erol and I quickly settled into a 5 p.m. ritual of Carlsberg on tap and Nutella crêpes. Our children, meanwhile, made it clear they were not destined for a life of haute cuisine. On Raclette night, Rafi clamped a paper napkin dramatically over his nose and elbowed his way through a crowd of cheese enthusiasts, determined to reach the nuggets-and-fries station tucked away in the farthest corner of the buffet. (Imagine his horror when we stopped in Gruyères, Switzerland, on the way home—an entire town that smells like melted cheese.) Leo, ever the creature of habit, maintained a strict diet of pasta and sliced cucumbers twice a day, followed by a suspiciously pink ice cream called Barbapapa—about as exotic as his dining habits got, in name alone.
Rafi entered a period of mourning the day we left and has already committed himself to a future as a European ski bum, which, frankly, I think I can support. Fortunately, his grief, combined with motion sickness and the sheer exhaustion of a full week of skiing, caused him to conk out in the car immediately, making the 5.5-hour drive home much more tolerable.
The drive back was surprisingly smooth, punctuated by just one stop in Gruyères. We paused for waffles and a drink, wandered through the tiny medieval town, and made a quick visit to the HR Giger Museum, home to the private collection of the Swiss artist best known for designing the iconic xenomorph from Alien—a creation that won him an Oscar for Best Visual Effects in 1979. (Both the alien and the Oscar were on display, which was pretty cool.)
Before we entered, the ticket seller cautioned that, while children get in free, the exhibit contains violent and pornographic imagery. Erol quickly shot back, “Perfect, our kids love that!” To be honest, I don't think they even noticed. The exhibit wasn't nearly as thrilling for them as the ice cream they got on the way back to the car, which kept them content until we returned to Freiburg for dinner.
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