...and we're back.

Happy New Year! We hope everyone has had a great holiday break and is recovering from last night's festivities. New Year's Eve in Amsterdam is a pretty big deal and today the streets are red with the scraps of the thousands of fireworks set off last night. We celebrated with some friends and several hundred strangers on a big party boat in the port. As we take the day to recover, here are some pictures from our big trip to Austria.

The trip was fantastic. Although we didn't get any fresh snow, the skiing (and boarding) was great and the sun was always out. Somehow, we managed to ski for 5 of the 6 days we were there, which wore us down, but also helped us burn off the calories from all the good Austrian food and beer. We stayed in a nice hotel at the base of the mountain and met our friends every day for breakfast and dinner and were served by our waitress, who was a hilariously loopy Dutch woman who had never waitressed before and was learning on the fly while working about 20 tables. But somehow it was great.


We hit the mountain pretty hard the first two days and celebrated Christmas Eve at the hotel with all the other guests. They had a tree lighting ceremony and one of the hotel owners read a 12 page story in German about the Littlest Angel. It took forever. Afterwards, everybody sang some carols in German (they helpfully handed out lyrics) and we had a huge Christmas dinner. A couple things about this picture: We were very impressed when they lit actual candles on the tree- don't think that would happen in an American hotel- but we were blown away when the owner started lighting the sparklers. Yeah.


We took Christmas day off and walked through town, did some snow-shoeing, and called our families. Here's Erika trudging through the snow:



We spent the last three days skiing and boarding and eating and drinking. It was a great trip and we're looking forward to more skiing while we're over here. Check out our Flickr link for more pictures.