The Travels of Garmisch: Skiing in Austria

This past weekend we spent 3 days skiing at Brandnertal, which is in western Austria. We were hoping to find some sunshine because Germany had started to be way too depressing. Here's what our drive through Germany to get to Austria looked like:

We ended up randomly finding a really nice hotel (Hotel Walliserhof, we highly recommend it)! We got a deal that included 3 nights in a spacious hotel room, a 6-course dinner every night, breakfast, lunch, an afternoon snack, a half-hour massage, and 2 days of lift tickets each. Here's a shot of my main course the first night, some white fish on top of some friend gnocchi. Yum.

Here I am taking a little break on the slopes:

Here's a helicopter airlifting somebody to a hospital. I think this is just how the ski patrol worked here - if you got too injured to make it down the slopes on your own the helicopter would come land right next to you and take you to the hospital! We saw it happen several times. I think health insurance here might cover this sort of thing. Kind of crazy.

These crystals formed in the bottom of our prosecco glasses one night! We asked our waiter about them and he was like, oh yeah, those are called wine stones. I guess they happen fairly regularly around here, I think in sparkling wine. They're potassium tartrate. I don't really know much else about them but they formed very quickly - we just looked at our glasses and there they were when they hadn't been there a few minutes before!

Here are some nice scenic pictures taken from various areas of the Brandnertal ski area:

Martin enjoying the view:

Stopping for lunch in the sunshine. Another couple from Bad Dürkheim came with us for the weekend so they took this picture for us. They are also from America and the husband also works for BASF and they are around our age so we became fast friends.