The View From Up Here

Quite some weather they've been having in Europe.  These last few weeks flights have been cancelled at Heathrow, Rome had its first heavy snowfall in 26 years, and the City of Lights was blanketed in white as well.  Although the photos look magical to me, it's usually not the kind of weather travelers hope for.  Blizzard conditions like these are actually what I obsessed about potentially affecting our trip to Switzerland in December - airport closures, zero visibility, intolerable cold.

Photo courtesy of tntmagazine.com

Photo courtesy of komonews.com

Photo taken from today.msnbc.msn.com

But we were lucky.  Sooooo very lucky.  Our first day in the Alps it snowed softly all day long, and the girls were overjoyed.  True divine intervention, however, happened on our ski day, New Year's Day.  Six of the girls in our group had never skied or snowboarded before and were scheduled to take a lesson.  I know from personal experience how miserable lessons are when you're cold and wet and can't see past your hands in front of you.  But I was more concerned with my daughter and another girl who were planning to take to the slopes on their own.  One look at the Adelboden trail map and its 42 lifts, 85 runs, and 106 miles of ski surface and I was sure they would end up in Austria if they got lost in poor visibility.

Imagine our joy when we woke up on New Year's Day to glorious sunshine!  The view that morning was intensely spectacular:

Adelboden village on New Year's Day.

In town that morning, all eleven of us took the TschentenAlp gondola up to the top of the mountain and were greeted by even more fabulous views.

I felt immediately confident that the two young snow bunnies would have no trouble finding the lifts or seeing the runs, so I sent them on their way with a trail map and a few granola bars.

The warm sunshine lasted all day and I was so thankful for our stroke of luck with the weather.  The six girls who took snowboarding lessons had no complaints, except about the bumps and bruises on their backsides from repeated falls on the slopes.  Most of the conversation that evening bubbled around Thor, or Dag, or whatever strong one-syllabled Norse name their handsome young instructor had.  More wise and worldly than I might have given them credit for, the girls figured out soon enough that most of his gratuitous bungling of the English language was aimed at flirting with his cute teenage pupils.  I'm sure I know what they dreamed about that night, but I dreamed about the incredulous view of the snow-covered Alps and Adelboden valley from up on top of that gorgeous mountain.