Family Travel: Winter Ski Trip to Banff

Every year, we plan a ski trip.  As we looked ahead on the calendar while planning back before summer 2019, we realized that we would need to travel over Christmas break to accommodate school calendars and the boys’ schedules.  The idea of being away from home on Christmas Day was a strange one, and we wanted it to feel like a super special, one of a kind Christmas experience for our family.  Next year, our oldest son will be in high school and it’s hard for me to reconcile the fact that the years of midnight Christmas Eve toy assembly and taking bites of cookies, sipping milk, and leaving a trail of crumbs (as Santa is known to do) are behind me.  The piles of Christmas presents used to be a lot taller (and a lot less expensive).  Life changes pretty quickly, and we made an intentional choice to make Christmas 2019 a really special one, and part of that included the decision to travel to Banff, Alberta, Canada. Banff, the beautiful, did not disappoint.  

We stayed at the Fairmont Banff Springs for the first part of our trip, spent time exploring the hotel and the town of Banff (including the gondola ride to see the entire valley), and spent a day driving up the Bow Valley Parkway to visit Lake Louise.  Banff is the most beautiful winter wonderland I could imagine, by far the most beautiful cold place we’ve traveled.  The second half of the week we spent at Sunshine Village on the mountain.  Dave had taken care of booking hotels while I did research on sights in the area and made plans on that end of things.  What I didn’t realize until after we were in Banff was that we’d be staying mid-mountain, meaning, we had to take the gondola up to our accommodations.  Since the gondola (and other lifts) closed at 5, we stayed in each night on the mountain under the dark, dark sky with so many stars.  At first, I was thinking “what are we going to do in the evenings??”  But with the outdoor hot pool, the beautiful stars, and a restaurant in the lodge, we were more than happy and it felt like we got the down time we needed to actually rest a bit (which is not our usual game plan for travel).  Banff is a beautiful place, the skiing was the best I’ve ever enjoyed (the snow quality was beyond amazing), people are kind (Canadians are the nicest people on the planet), and experiencing at Christmas felt like a dream come true.  As magical as those Christmases with little boys were, this is one will stand out in my mind.  It was magical in its own way.

I am a firm believer that vacations should be documented! For families traveling in summer 2020 to Ocean City, NJ contact me to book “day in the life” vacation sessions!