When Tim got sick in Austria, I decided I’d take the kids sledding in the Elfa mountain, something the hotel had told tim would be fun.
And of course, when they say it takes 5 min to walk to the gondola, that means it’ll take you 20-25 min. After getting there, I paid for a sled rental and asked for a round trip gondola ride. You mean “up,” the guy clarified. I said no, “hin und zurück.” The guy corrected again, but when I ignored him, he reciprocated and ignored me right back.
So up we went to the top of the mountain. We got off and I asked an attendant where the sledding hill was. He said I could go right by the gondola hill (super steep) or walk down to the track. So we follows the sledding sign, and I noticed that only adults were carrying sleds, some of them wearing goggles and helmets.
I saw the start of the track and since I couldn’t see the end of it, assumed that it stopped just after the switchback. I released the kids down the hill and ran along side them. That soon became we even running after them, which in turn became me screaming and shouting to Ella to throw herself to the side to stop the sled!
Ella did exactly that, though she claimed she couldn’t hear me and that she came up with the idea of throwing herself off to the side to stop the sled, but the important part was that it did stop.
So I asked a passing family if the track was steep all the way down, and I finally understood that one is supposed to sled all the way down (all 8 km down, I later found out). The lady also hinted that it was not a good idea to take two kids down one sled by myself.
It was then that an older Austrian man passed by and again I asked him about the track. Sensing my desperation, he offered to take one of the kids with him down the steepest hundred meters. We stopped at a pit stop and he offered to take down another kid. Then, he told me how to really brake and wished me good luck. With no other choice, I put Rhys in the front, backpack in top of him and Ella on my back. We sledded down and started to have fun. I was scared and couldn’t really brake very well, but of course I never told the kids. Instead, I just prayed we made it down safely.
There was laughter and fun until our first crash when Rhys fell down and re-emerged with his face all covered in snow. From that point on, he no longer asked me to go faster; instead, he asked me why we weren’t slowing down.
There was another crash, this time on a band, when a German woman with her daughter repeated scheisse, scheisse, and Rhys and the girl were crying. We lingered there a bit but we had to continue.
It wasn’t much longer until we reached the bottom (I didn’t know that then) and had to walk another mile (me pulling the kids on the sled half the way). It turned out, we had taken a wrong turn because we should have finished by the gondola.
I later found out that the hotel people had told tim that sledding on the Elfa was dangerous. Later that week, when we stopped at a skialm and I told some German folks I had sledded down that hill with my kids, the first word out of the man wearing lederhosen was “gefährlich” or “dangerous.”
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