St Anton / Pettneu am Arlberg

We arrived in Pettneu/ St Anton on Boxing Day and spent the afternoon sorting ourselves out for another 3 day ski mission. 

The next day it was a pleasure having to get only ourselves out of the house, with no gear & in our soft snow boots. The ski buses are brilliant, going every 15 mins to and from St Anton and the  villages around it, all free for skiers, so you totally avoid the need to use the car at all. And the best part is no drive home at the end of the day - straight off the snow & just a 5 minute bus ride right to our doorstep. We stored our ski gear at the rental shop right at the gondola so each day we got our boots on there, picked up our skis and off we went.    

 

We had beautiful weather but the snow wasn't great - they were making it furiously so there were lots of piles of snow but it wasn't holding up to the Xmas holiday crowds and there was a lot of pure ice underneath on many of the main slopes - not my favourite!  But we hadn't been expecting much on the skiing front given our timing, so we were pretty stoked to get 3 days here, making it a total of 8 in Europe (about the same as my usual number of days in a whole season at home!)

The views were awesome and the fields were huge - they managed to absorb the hordes of people pretty well, with chairlifts and gondolas and cable cars criss-crossing everywhere as far as the eye could see and all the skiers like ants dotted on the slopes below.

  

Bill was still a little plagued by the tummy bug for the first few days, but battled on - and by Day 2 he was at last able to stomach a beer at lunch...

 

The kids managed well in the tough conditions....even though every now and then we would encounter icy log jams like this one, where it was wipe-out central all around us : 

 

Another highlight of Pettneu was the Wellness Centre - also included with the ski pass - which we went to after skiing - a massive indoor pool with heaps of pool toys which the kids loved. They even learned how to back flip off the diving boards with help from the Aussie guy who was in charge of the pool. We met heaps of friendly Aussies in St Anton, they must feel a connection to their namesakes the Austrians which was possibly lost on us...

We ate dinner and breakfast at the apartment where occasionally some additional discipline was required.. guess who :

On the last day, we went up to Valluga which is right at the very top - it's a crazy cable car ride straight across two valleys, instead of just up and down the ridgeline...the views at the top were amaze balls.. 

 

 

Zoe picked her moment to avenge the spraying of snow she had suffered by Bill the day before...

  

Then it was the long ski down which was the run of the day

  

There was even a kids' fun park run where Zoe and Amelia hit some tunnels and high-fived some hands

 

Then it was time to put the apres into ski and hit the amazing on-piste bars on offer at St Anton. First was late lunch & beers in the sun where we had to memorialise another one of Bill's happiest life moments....

  

 

Harv got bored of us and went for a last run on his own and Zoe busied herself making a ski jump

    

Then it was time to hit the legendary Mooserwirt, about which we had heard a lot from AJ and Ross. It did not disappoint...absolute mayhem at 3pm - packed to the gunnels and heaving, people dancing on tables - the DJ blasting tunes, flashing lights and a smoke machine - and that's just inside! The kids couldn't believe their luck - good times!

   

Luckily, after that, it was only a short ski down to the bottom, where we found another great apres-ski bar so we felt compelled to pop in for a couple more...

 

Then it was home on the bus where the sprite-high continued....

 

Zoe says : I loved St Anton because the skiing was so good and I got really colourful skis but as soon as I tried them out I realised that twin tips were actually really hard. So on the same day we went down and changed them. The other ones weren't too colourful but I still really liked them. After skiing every day except the last day we went to the pool. There was a really cool massive pool - it had floaties, noodles, donuts, lilos etc What I loved about the pool best was that there were big diving boards and I could do whatever I wanted off them. Harvey made a friend called Luca - he was from Strasbourg. 

Harvey says: I really liked testing my skiing abilities again. I think mum liked testing her boozing abilities as well. Like other people, she liked the apres better than the ski and because of her enthusiasm towards apres skiing we headed down to Mooserwirt which was this amazingly cool bar. St Anton was skiing earth compared to Cortina which was skiing heaven - it wasn't hell but it wasn't heaven either. Overall, I quite liked my time there. 

Amelia says: It felt great to get onto the slopes again. Although the snow wasn't very good, the views were definitely something else. We went up to the very tip top of the mountain to see the best views of all. We took a bunch of selfies. It was funny because a few nights at the apartment we watched on TV a whole documentary about NZ - it was very funny to see all the hidden secrets of our own country. On the last day, we really did do apres-ski. The first bar we went to was really nice and in the sun. When it started to get shady, everyone started heading to the Mooserwirt - when we got inside, all these lights started flashing and music started cranking really loud. We got the best views from upstairs because we could see the DJ. There were these people sitting next to us, and lots of other people, who started dancing really wildly to this song that I think was in German. They were doing all these weird actions but we couldn't make out what they were doing them to!