After yet another round of travel plans cancelled due to COVID restrictions, and with a 3-week winter break to fill up, we found ourselves in Innsbruck, Austria for a long weekend to ring in 2022 and celebrate Matt’s birthday. We’d driven past Innsbruck a few times but had never been able to stop in – it’s a beautiful and surprisingly large city nestled in the Austrian Alps.

Our hotel was across the street from the Olympic bobsled track that was built for the 1976 Winter Olympics. The track is one of only a handful in Europe, so it’s still used by athletes all over the world for practice and for Championship races in bobsled, luge, and skeleton. When we discovered that they allow ‘regular’ people to ride the full run in padded bobsleds, we knew we had to give it a try.

When we got to the top of the track, we found that there were bobsled teams and skeleton athletes from Israel, Switzerland, Japan, Great Britain, Poland, and the Ukraine all gearing up for their practice sessions that day. The European Championships took place the following week in Innsbruck, so it was awesome to see these elite athletes getting ready for competition.

The best part was that they were so kind to all of us who were there to try out the run – a guy from Great Britain even lent a hand to give us an extra push down the track!

I only wish we’d been able to take a video or a picture of this experience – it was the dream of a lifetime that I really never knew I had, to be flying down a run like that at 60mph in a sled, hugging the curves and flying up and down the sides of the track. I really recommend it!

We were also looking for some good sledding snow, which was surprisingly difficult, due to the not-so-surprising warmer temperatures these days, even in the Alps. But we did manage to find a great hike-up-sled-down 1.5-mile sled run about an hour away, in Kühtai. Check out how short the days really are here in Europe – the sun you see in the first picture was taken at noon – the sun barely makes it over the horizon!

We’d never ridden on these wooden-style sleds, but they’re a favorite with Europeans – we saw many moms and dads who were riding down holding a baby, or with one strapped to the sled next to them. I guess there’s something to be said for growing up in the mountains!

We also had a lot of fun taking a gondola to the top of one of the nearby mountains and then hiking back down in the snow – at some points the kids could just body-sled their way down.

We finished up with dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe for Matt’s birthday – with nachos, burgers, mac and cheese, and wings, it was a perfect American-style meal to ring in 2022!!

Austria continues to be one of my favorite places here – with awesome food, beautiful mountains, plenty do inside and out, really nice people, some of the best coffee, comparatively lower prices than its neighbors, and nothing to prove – it never disappoints!