Rory Fitzgerald
There is nothing less relaxing than a holiday. That is an axiom all parents of small children should bear in mind when gazing naively at travel brochures.
This axiom is all the more burning in its bitter truth if your holiday involves – as ours did last week – travelling through four snow-and-ice-covered countries in seven days in a rental car with three small children.
Snow has in recent years taken on the lure of a magical substance in our household. It never snows where we live and the elusive nature of snow has made it all the more alluring to the children. When snow is forecast, the kids bubble over with excitement, which inevitably turns to bitter disappointment when we get rain, or – at best – sleet.
Their dreams of sledding and snowmen are dashed once again as a single snowflake melts into the mud.
This year, we resolved to compensate them for all those years of disappointment by indulging them with tons of the stuff. My wife’s dad lives in Germany’s Black Forest, and we were overdue a visit to him so the stars all seemed aligned for a budget snow holiday. The flights to the skiing areas of Europe were all booked up for half term, but we found handy flights to Luxembourg. Viewed from space, Luxembourg seems quite close to south Germany. Viewed from the driving seat of a hire car on a snow-covered mountain pass, it is somewhat less convenient, I can confirm.
Despite the logistics, snow worked its magic. As the plane touched down in Luxembourg, the children screamed, sending a minor wave of panic throughout the cabin. Yet theirs was a scream of delight, as the whole airport was covered in snow.
A few hours later we pulled over in a forest park in the French Vosges mountains where our three-year-old played in snow for the first time in her life, and took immense delight in snapping off icicles and making snow angels. Naturally, a family snowball fight ensued.
It was like Christmas morning for our eldest when he awoke in his grandfather’s house in the Black Forest to discover the whole village covered in a fresh blanket of snow. He gazed out the window before giving a running commentary on the snow-ploughs driving through the village and the current state of the snow. He took great pride in helping his grandfather shovel snow from the driveway, before the kids made elaborate snowmen and improvised sleds in the garden.
Driving through the Black Forest, the kids kept pointing towards modest peaks and asking, “Is that an Alp?” “Wait until you see the Alps,” I told them.
The pinnacle of our holiday, as it were, was a two-day detour into the heart of the Swiss Alps. As we approached the massive Eiger and Monch, white and craggy against a blue sky, there were gasps of awe from the back seat. Before long, we were boarding a cable car to take us to a high Alpine village, some 6,000 feet above sea level – or two Carrauntoohils, to use the Irish unit of mountain measurement. As the cable car rose up, our toddler looked up at me with a bemused expression on her face as we rose above the pine trees and asked: “Why is this bus flying?” “Because it’s a magic bus,” I told her. “I like our magic bus,” she said.
The rest of the week was filled with more fun for the kids, from sledding to trying skiing and just gazing in awe at the beauty of winter. We had all, together, entered another world for a week. All the packing, driving, travelling and exhaustion was more than worth it for the smiles on the kids’ faces – and ours.