Verbier: A Breath of Fresh Air

I, however, enrolled for beginner adult lessons with Altitude, a ski school catering to British tourists with mainly English instructors. A comedy of errors occurred my first day out. I was told to seek an instructor named Grant and was shuffled into the wrong group, with a different Grant teaching with an entirely different school. That would have been okay, but imagine my surprise as I realize that instead of the kiddie slopes, I’m being taken up to the top of the mountain! Needless to say, I was terrified and kept telling the European Snow sports instructor that I was a true beginner—and hadn’t skied in about seven years. Lets just say I was not graceful and couldn’t stop and have not been that utterly frightened since child birth! My husband, the expert skier, had to stop and laugh as I was desperately trying to navigate a particularly steep hill. I’m sure he had claw marks on his arms as I begged him to stay and “get me down!” The next day we sorted the problem and I was loaded onto a bus and taken to the kiddie slope to meet my Altitude instructors who provided wonderful “basic” instruction to get me confident enough to tackle the mountain later. Another perk is that I was able to watch my son at the same time. The cost is 320 francs for five half days of instruction. Due to our mix-up, they kindly did not charge me for one day.

As far as where to stay in Verbier, there are so many choices between chalets and apartments to rent and hotels and Bed & Breakfasts. A good place to start is on the Verbier site where they list accommodations; the site is available in English, just click EN at the top. Since we used frequent flyer miles to purchase our flights, we opted to splurge and stay in a hotel quite near the main ski lift: Hotel Four Valleys. We were given their only ground floor apartment with a kitchenette that opened onto its own patio with mounds of snow for my son to tackle daily. The staff couldn’t have been nicer—providing a babysitter one evening (albeit for 25 francs an hour!) and always being helpful, such as loaning us an American-European adapter for my son’s DVD player. Breakfast, which is included, is a typical Swiss buffet with muesli, fruit, yogurt, Serrano ham and gruyere cheese slices, croissants, etc. This hotel is not cheap (between 190 francs and 595 francs a night), but we highly recommend it, especially if you want a five-minute walk to the ski lift and ski school meeting points.