Walking in a winter wonderland: Nendaz, Switzerland, with kids
We spent four days in a gorgeous chalet in the Swiss ski resort town of Nendaz and gave some winter sports a try! We had a little rental car drama (turns out, diesel freezes!) but overall had an amazing time, particularly thanks to the amazing people at Nendaz Ski School.
The scene: we’re finishing up hour three of our skiing lesson, and I’ve just done my final run down the bunny hill. I managed to TURN repeatedly and STOP when needed. In my only other ski experience, these were what you might call “sticking points.” (Sticking points that led at various points to 1) crashing into a wall, 2) somehow losing one ski halfway down the mountain, and 3) a longstanding aversion to skiing).
Ceseare, our ski instructor, informs me that next time I’m out, I should be able to try a real hill. Like the kind you’d take a ski lift to do! A real one!
I. Am. Ecstatic.
I am the queen of the bunny hill.
I’m thinking, SUCK IT, Minnesota!*
In fact, I am SO CONFIDENT that I figure, Ima just ski right over to the rest of my family! Wow, this is going to be so much easier than carrying these skis!
You can see where this is going, right?
I turn my skis in the direction of Karoline, Lochlan’s ski instructor/babysitter, who is sitting in the snow holding our boy who, for whatever reason, has decided ski lessons are the time to suddenly become a child who actually naps. Suddenly I am picking up speed. Suddenly I can’t seem to do that cool turning stuff that I was just doing a second ago. Suddenly my “pizza” stance isn’t slowing me down any more.
Suddenly I’m acutely aware that I’m just about to flatten the shit out of a lovely Swiss 20-something and my own 2-year-old son.
And that, my friends, is how I wound up ignominiously chucking myself onto the ground in front of a great number of people. Mostly children. JUDGY Swiss children, to my mind.**
*Minnesota being the scene of my previous inglorious skiing attempt.
**I have no actual evidence any of the children were either judging me or even paying attention. And YET.
So! With that story out of the way, let’s back up.
Why go to Switzerland in early December?
We’ve been here for five years, but hadn’t even seriously discussed going to Switzerland, mostly because we’d heard it was outrageously expensive. It entered our radar more when I was trying to decide where to go for Thanksgiving (we ended up going nowhere, which was for the best because we were all sick), in part because there are a lot of cheap flights to Milan and it is easy to drive to Switzerland from there. We ended up opting to go in December because it turned out, ski resorts wouldn’t be open yet at the end of November and Chris wanted to give skiing a try. We ended up going in early December — before the “official” ski season really started — because we didn’t know what was happening with our move and also there was a limited inventory of cool chalets available once you got closer to Christmas. We were a little worried about being there before the “official” ski season started, but it worked out perfectly for our situation.
Where we stayed:
After deciding to ditch our original plan to take trains all around Switzerland, we settled on going to the 4 Vallées region, an area known for its skiing and only an easy three-hour drive from Milan Malpensa airport. Since we knew this was likely to be our last trip before the move, we opted to up our usual budget to stay in a really lovely chalet near the town of Nendaz. If you are heading to this area, I can’t recommend this place enough! It was absolutely gorgeous and somehow extremely warm and cozy, despite these massive windows. Honestly, one of my favorite parts of the trip was just hanging out in this gorgeous house. It was also a convenient location: about a 5-minute drive to the town of Nendaz, and a 7-minute drive to Siviez, where we skied. 
The entire main floor of this house had the most incredible windows overlooking the mountains, while downstairs included a ski room to ditch your wet clothes, three cozy bedrooms and two excellent bathrooms, including a huge tub in one. Seriously, you want to stay at this place if you are going to Nendaz.
What we did in Nendaz with kids:
- Sledding
- Playing in the snow
- Ski lessons
- Christmas market at Montreux
- Visit to the local creche for Lochie
- RELAXED! (This one is not usually on our itinerary but was very needed, ha!)
Thursday:
Highlights: arriving at our Airbnb, playing in the snow, eating fondue
After landing at Milan Malpensa, we rented a car and started our drive into Switzerland. On advice of another friend, we stopped at a grocery store while still in Italy to stock up on snacks and drinks before we drove into expensive Switzerland. This was definitely a good move and I recommend it, but I will say our kids seemed to take the presence of “snacks for the whole weekend” as a challenge. I’m not sure how it happened that they opened four bags of chips in a day, but it did and it was unfortunate.
When we landed in Milan, there was a little snow waiting for us but it was already melting. Owen spent the entire car ride keeping an eye on the car’s temperature gauge and absolutely panicking about how it wasn’t cold enough (about 4C) to snow. We told him to be patient and ….
There was at least six inches of snow on the ground when we arrived, and it snowed continuously all day the next day. Suffice it to say, we got all the snow we could handle!
First order of business, then, was to get outside and play in the snow. My fellow hearty Midwesterners are about to have a laugh, but I have to admit that in the five years we’ve been living in balmy Sicily I had COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN what an epic pain in the ass it is to get kids bundle up to go outside and play. And fix their gloves every five seconds. And then have them ready to come in in less time than it took to get ready, followed by an immediate desire to get back out there five minutes after you’ve stripped them out of the boots.
That said, we had a blast! The snow wasn’t really packing snow, but they still managed to build forts, chuck snowballs at each other and make a mini snowman. Plus, the huge hill on the side of the house made a perfect slide. 
And the view! At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it was unreal.
Literally all the kids wanted out of their Switzerland experience was to play in the snow, so on Day One it was already MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Hell. Yeah.
On advice from our AirBnB host, I ran out an bought some cheese from a local shop so that we could give the house’s fondue pot a whirl. 
Fiona and I liked it well enough (and gamely soldiered on even after the appeal wore off because HOLY HELL DID I EVER BUY TOO MUCH CHEESE), but Owen and Chris immediately declared it “TOO SMELLY” to cope with.
I just read this to Chris and he says, dead serious, “IT SMELLED LIKE FEET, KASEY.” Apparently time has not softened his memory of this cheese.
(FYI, it absolutely didn’t,) 
Friday:
Creche for Lochie, sledding and lunch for us and the beginning of The Troubles.
When we originally decided to take ski lessons, I made my plans based on the assumption that 2-year-olds can’t ski. I also figured that it didn’t matter what day of the week we did a lesson, as we’d signed up for a private family lesson. Turns out, I was wrong on both scores, but thanks to the amazing people at the Nendaz Ski School it all ended up working out.
Original plan: Enroll Lochie in the local creche on Friday (they allow drop-in care during the ski season), then Chris, Fiona, Owen and I have our private ski lesson while he’s in school. I had this all scheduled, but then got a call from Mel, the owner of the Nendaz Ski School.
She explained that while we were more than welcome to have our lesson Friday as scheduled, waiting until Saturday would allow us to use the kids’ area at Siviez, which would open for the season that day. Makes perfect sense, right? Except at that point, I’ve explained to her that we didn’t have childcare for Lochie on Saturday (creche isn’t open on Saturdays that early in the season). This is where I learned that 2-year-olds — and younger! — do actually ski. Mel’s own daughter — a couple months younger than Lochlan — was both attending the creche where Lochie would be, and would be skiing on Saturday when we were there! Still, given my rocky history with skiing, I was a bit nervous about this. The solution: Mel suggested that we have Karoline, another instructor, babysit/teach Lochie while the rest of us had our lesson with Ceseare. PERFECT.
Since we’d already paid for the creche, however, I wasn’t about to skip out on that. So, at Mel’s suggestion, we rented some sleds and went sledding with just the big kids! Everything actually could not have worked out better because Mel’s shop, the creche and an excellent sledding hill were all within 250m of each other. Excellent.
It also helped that everything was close together because Friday turned out to be basically a blizzard. It was like we were inside of a snow globe that had just been shaken up, but it lasted all. day. long. Amazing (and slippery).
We had so much fun! Lochie being in school also made it much easier for us to go over to Mel’s ski shop and get everything squared away for our Saturday lesson, including getting fitted for our skis. 
Mel and her team could seriously have been more patient or helpful throughout the whole process, and even problem-solved issues that we didn’t know enough about skiing to know that we had. For instance, it hadn’t occurred to us that we would need a way to transport the skis we were renting. Whoops. Apparently there are ski buses that would handle that, but Mel deemed that Too Much Hassle for us to deal with while also corralling all the kids. Her solution? She was taking her own daughter skiing on Saturday anyway, she’d just throw our five sets of skis on her car. CLUTCH.
Mel was also incredibly sweet and checked on Lochie for us while he was at the creche, as she was running by there to grab her own kiddo. She is just the best. He ended up loving it, by the way, and would have stayed longer.
We took Lochie for a few quick sledding runs after picking him up from creche, then got him fitted for his own little baby skis.
Heading back to our chalet was when we truly began to appreciate the difficulty our rental car was having. On the way into town, it has really struggled to grip the road, which we attributed to the not-yet-plowed snow. On the way back, it started doing this really fun thing where it just sort of …. died? Again, for whatever reason we just figured the snow was to blame and it would be fine once the roads were plowed.
Ha. Ha. HAHAHAHAHAHA. Ha.
Saturday:
The (Car) Troubles, a train ride to the Montreux Christmas Market
Saturday dawned to big excitement for our SKI DAY! What we came for! What we’ve spent so much time (and money) getting ready for! All I needed to do was make a quick run to town to get cash to pay Karoline, which should take maybe 15 minutes at most.
After 45 minutes of the car dying repeatedly, for no apparent reason, on the perfectly-paved roads, I knew we had a BIG FREAKING PROBLEM.
I was in full-on panic mode not only because I was worried about how the hell we were going to get this car fixed, but mostly because of everything that had gone into planning this trip. At least four different people from the ski school were already involved and, I feared, were already on their way to the ski spot because I’d waited until the last minute to get the cash. (They were). I could not have felt worse about the entire thing.
Fortunately, however, Mel & Co. continued to be absolutely amazing. They HAD to be frustrated with us given that they’d done all this stuff for us, but if they were it was impossible to discern. They offered two solutions: they had room in the car to pick up the kids and one adult right then, or we could push the lesson back until tomorrow. We went with the second option, and I’m extremely grateful they were kind enough to do that.
Saturday ended up with Chris entertaining the kids inside and outside, while I spent most of the day arguing with Europecar. There seemed to be some significant differences of opinion about whose problem we were, since we rented in Italy but the problem happened in Switzerland. Also, my cell phone broke.
The whole story is long and convoluted, but eventually we found out the problem and man, is it infuriating.
So, diesel freezes. When we rented the car, the Europecar guy warned us that this could happen if the temperature dipped to -15C. Swiss diesel always includes additives that keep it from freezing, but Italian doesn’t. So, if it got cold we’d just need to make sure we got Swiss diesel. So, ok, we’d been told this. But here’s the thing: the temperature never came anywhere near -15! Because of this, it didn’t occur to us that it could be the problem. Turns out, it was. We had some language barriers with our Swiss mechanic, but he pretty quickly came to the conclusion that this was the problem because it had apparently been solved by the fact that I’d been sitting in the car, running it, for more than an hour while I waited for him and this, I guess, melted the diesel sufficiently to eliminate the problem. All we had to do to permanently fix the problem was to put in Swiss diesel. Chris later did research and learned that while diesel shouldn’t freeze until lower temperatures, really poor quality diesel can freeze as soon as it hits 0C. THANKS, ITALY.
So on the one hand it was excellent news that the only thing we had to do to fix the car was to put in new Swiss diesel. On the other, it was maddening that it took hours of stress and phone tag with so many different people to find out that was the problem. But c’est la vie!
Anyway, figuring this out took most of the day but we were determined not to lose out on everything we planned. We wanted to go to Montreux for the famous Christmas markets on Sunday, but since Sunday had become Ski Day, we decided we’d try to go that evening. We opted to drive into nearby Sion so that we could take the train into Montreux, and I do recommend this. There was a very convenient and affordable carpark right at the train station, and we were able to find our train very easily.
We thought Swiss trains were pretty fancy, but it turned out we had accidentally sat in the first class carriages. We were quickly shuffled along to where we belonged, haha.
The market was beautiful to look at, but we made a bit of a tactical error by going on Saturday night because it was insanely crowded. Crowded to the point that you couldn’t really enjoy it because you had to push through so many people. 
Owen dislikes crowds, so he was kind of losing it. But, we did salvage our evening with some McDonald’s (a tradition in every single country we visit), some gluhwein and accidentally buying more than 40 francs worth of candy (that one still smarts). The trains from Montreux to Sion run about every half hour, so we were able to head back after a couple of hours. 
Sunday
Ski Day! The real ski day! YAY!
First, skiing is freaking hard! Second, skiing is so much easier when you have actual instruction. Ha!
Because we are the worst people on the planet, we were late to our ski lesson. We thought leaving 30 minutes early for a lesson located only 7 minutes away was reasonable, but apparently we should have left much earlier. For crying out loud, we could not give the Nendaz Ski School people a break, could we??
Once we got there, we met with Mel, her daughter, our instructor Ceasare and Lochie’s instructor/babysitter, Karoline, at a cafe on the mountain. We got into our equipment (with great difficulty for *cough* some of us) and left our pissed-off baby with Karoline, and we were off!
Our instructor, Ceasare, was fantastic and extremely patient with us four complete novices. One or more of us would periodically start just slipping away from the crowd, but he was always kind enough to retrieve us. He also was extremely encouraging when one of my kids started to get very frustrated by not immediately mastering the entire sport in an hour. 
The area we went to seemed like a great spot for kids, and there was tons of them there! I couldn’t believe how many tiny tots were just zooming around like it was nothing, while I was just trying not to crash into anyone. The “magic carpet” on the bunny hill was particularly helpful for getting us up the bunny hill, as walking in skis proved to be extremely difficult. 
Lochie apparently spent most of the lessons walking around with Karoline in his ski boots, but didn’t care for the skis themselves. He then … fell asleep?! On Karoline!? Our kid who only ever naps for his preschool teachers would decide that the side of a mountain, in ski boots, during a lesson, would be the perfect time for a kip. Honestly.
Chris and I would have like to have stayed a little longer to ski more or to rent some sleds (also available!), but by the end of our lesson the kids were completely exhausted so we decided to head out. (This, by the way, is where the incident from the beginning of the post occurred). We found some lunch along the way, then headed back to the ranch to spend the rest of the day relaxing.
Overall, I was very pleased with our ski experience and definitely think this is something we want to try again in the future. We pretty much just dipped our toes in this year, but I think in the future we’ll have to try skiing for more days in a row so we can really get the hang of it.
Overall, if you are thinking about visiting Switzerland, we were very impressed with the Nendaz area! It was absolutely gorgeous and there was tons more to do that we didn’t have time for, including spas and all manner of other snow sports, including ice skating.
Monday, we headed back to Milan for the airport and I have just one quick story on that. We’re driving along and all of the sudden the Google Maps instructions tell us, with no further explanation, that we were to BOARD A TRAIN. As in, “take the left fork and board the train.” Just, WHAT? It turns out there is a train FOR CARS that transports you through the mountain. Insane, right!? It was incredibly cool and all five of us were tickled. However, it almost ended up with another “incident” because the guy in front of us on the train clearly didn’t read the pamphlet provided and did not turn off his car or set the parking break. As soon as the train started moving, his car started sliding backwards into ours. Chris laid on the horn to get him to WAKE UP and the guy slammed on his break about an inch from our bumper. WHEW.
This trip was a bit of a last hurrah for us, as we are moving back to the United States in just a few weeks. Chris has taken a new job in the Columbus, Ohio, area, so we are gearing up for some new adventures. I’m really sad to leave here because I could not love Sicily and our life here more, but I’m grateful for the five wonderful years we’ve had (some of which I still need to write about!). I do plan to keep this blog going, although naturally the pace of travel will slow down once we are stateside again. To anyone who has stuck with me for the last five years on this: thank you.
Here’s to the future! 
