Austria

This is when it starts to get tricky…… I wanted to have a year-end ski holiday with my family. December 2014 coincided with my older son Liam turning 18 years old. As a birthday present, we allowed him to invite four other friends to join us and rented a separate apartment for them. Another family also joined us from Jakarta, together with my best friend’s 18-year old daughter. We were quite a large group. We chose Innsbruck in Austria because they once held the Winter Olympics in 1976 and had several resorts in the city. Skiing here is quite good, although it is better for intermediate and advanced skiers. Innsbruck is also a beautiful and historic city and home to universities, therefore had many restaurants, bars and clubs. Perfect for the young adults and perfect for the parents. But as one can imagine, the young adults didn’t do much skiing at the end! We still had a fantastic time and managed to squeeze a visit to Munich by car, which was where half of the group flew into and flew back out.

***            Note: Make sure if you are renting a separate apartment for your young adult sons and their friends, before you check out and leave (and especially when you have put up a security deposit) that you GO AND CHECK THE UNIT YOURSELF in case they, for example, left a shopping trolley full of empty cans of beer and bottles INSIDE the apartment!!!

Canada:

Whistler is also a fantastic choice, whether your children are young, teenagers or adults. We skied there the year-end holiday the year before we went to Innsbruck. We also met up with some friends too. It is also good for all types of skiers, from beginners to advanced. They have several ski-in, ski-out resorts. It is where they held the Winter Olympics in 2010. This is one of my favourite resort because Canada’s landscape is stunning. Unfortunately for people like us living in Europe, this is quite far and we were only there for one week and therefore had to struggle to adjust to the several-hours difference in time zone. This is one of the most popular ski destination in the world and like other large resorts, can be very expensive during holiday season.