We were thrilled to meet up with Mimi in Innsbruck for a week of exploring the Alps and Dolomites. We loved our time in Reith Alpbachtal, a gorgeous ski town in Austria. The home we stayed in was beautiful and large. It had amazing mountain views and directly across the street was a local swimming lake. Everyone travelling to this area must purchase a tourist card (price incorporated into accommodation charges), this allows you “free” access to the gondolas, making touring very accessible. One of the gondolas was 100 m from our house.
The hiking trails were designed to entertain kids with many cool structures like zip lines, obstacle courses, goat feeding, wooden play structures, and bowling. A bogy pond stole one of Aiden’s running shoes. A lovely young local boy tried to help us in his bare feet. Despite searching through the muddy bog, coming up to mid-calf, we had no luck finding the shoes. Alastair and I had to return home to get another pair of shoes so Aiden could get down the mountain trail.
That night we had a lovely dinner, Mimi’s treat, celebrating Aiden‘s birthday, he ordered a huge steak topped with garlic butter. We had a lovely courtyard table under a massive tree, the staff all laughed when Aiden steak was delivered to him. Luckily, it was a “Vyvanse free day”, and he did quite well on the steak. Chanterell mushrooms were in season, so Mimi and I had a lovely pasta as well as pork dish, the leftovers made fantastic dinner the following night.
Unfortunately, the morning we were departing we did not realize it was Sunday, everything was closed. With the help of the local dairy vending machine we were able to scrape together a reasonable breakfast. We then headed up the largest gondola. The adults had explored the day before and knew we could not allow the kids to miss the opportunity to visit the most amazing playground we have ever seen! The views from this gondola and play ground were incredible! We took a luge ride part way down the mountain, it was long and exciting (I was terrified). Aiden loved the diving boards over an airbag jumping mattress. Mimi was thrilled that most of the play equipment was handmade out of wood, clearly built to help develop sensory motor skills as kids have fun. There was also an amazing obstacle course, both Alastair and I tried it, quickly discovering it was harder than it looked. The kids navigated it “no problem”. Retrospectively we were grateful for the decision to have this wonderful morning of play and outdoors as our travel through the Brenner Pass in the Dolomites, Northern Italy, was hugely delayed because of traffic.
