Map of Norway
I AM NOT a skiing sort; places such as Verbier, St Moritz and Klosters mean little to me, except that I know they’re expensive, feature annually in Heat magazine, and are often the site of an embarrassing royal photo opportunity. As for après-ski, the very idea of dancing among blinging people with orange-tanned faces and white necks in clubs still called discothèques makes me squeamish. So it was thus — for reasons of economy, and I feel, somehow, propriety — that the five of us went on our first family skiing holiday to a tiny village in deepest Norway called Geilo.
Direct flight from grim Gatwick and all that, but as soon as we landed in Fagernes, calm descended. It was more an airfield than an airport, surrounded by snow-covered pines, its terminal a cheerful wooden hut. We booked the package through Neilson, which supplied a coach that drove for about two hours through fantastic landscapes, past frozen lakes and red-painted wooden farmhouses in the snow.
We could ski out from our cabin among the birch trees straight to the ski lifts. And what a cabin. It was wood-clad in and out, Shaker-style, and warm as toast, with underfloor heating and a wood-burning stove. We had an eight-person cabin, which my husband, two sons, daughter and I were sharing with two friends from London and their daughter. This also meant that we could babysit for each other, but more of the thrilling nightlife later.
I had skied for about two days, 15 years ago, and I was atrocious then. Now, at least, I have runners’ thighs to hold me up, but I was sick with fear as I joined the beginners’ morning lesson at the foot of the mountains. The children, all novices, displayed the opposite emotions as we dropped them at the Snowbusters children’s club, which would take them to lessons, lunch, and to tobogganing or art in the afternoon. The youngsters jammed on their helmets and boots, and showed instant poise and balance, owing to their low centre of gravity. It was most annoying.
The two girls, 4 and 5, were in the Snøball ski group, on the sweetest, safest beginner slopes, with a dinky button lift and wooden cutouts of giant Norwegian trolls leering out of the bushes as they snowploughed past. After a few hours the girls were exhausted, and spent happy afternoons painting and watching videos in the kids’ club.
The two boys, 8 and 10, were designated Småtrolls, but one was soon elevated to the Skogtrolls’ club. Within days, they were displaying worrying levels of daring, hammering down red runs, flying over moguls, crash-landing and leaping up in the rubber-boned way of youth for more, more. Sometimes I would look down from the ski lift and see one of my children trying to emulate Eddie the Eagle — and there was nothing I could do.
I was doing slightly less splendidly with the ladies from Godalming in my English-speaking-novices section, but soon I was elevated to the not-totally-crap group. It turned out that what I considered to be scary black and red runs were, in fact, “easy-peasy” and the Norwegian mountains were “mere hills”. In the resort of Geilo, and its sister village across the lake, there were few black runs. “Nothing really challenging,” said my experienced hutmates. “Makes you feel like an Olympic skier if you’re used to the Alps.”
Still, for our purposes, with young children, Geilo was pretty good. There were few queues for the lifts, no lift rage, no pushing, and often you could be almost alone on the top of a recently snow- powdered mountain — and this was the February half-term. The only problem was the food. The cafés on the ski slopes served school-canteen fare, pre-Jamie Oliver: chips, dried-out pizza and hotdogs. The adults survived on soup or trips to the nearby hotel, which had good bread and gravlax. It was fortunate, then, that one of our hutmates had brought his entire cupboard of Indian spices with him, knowing that cardamom pods were beyond the local supermarkets. Thus, with good Norwegian meat and fish, we ate fantastically at home. I suggest you load up a carrier bag with delicious delicatessen supplies, and bring wines from the airport duty-free, because nothing is cheap in the frozen north.
While our friends babysat, my husband and I went out to a restaurant across the valley, owned by a Norwegian television chef. It was like something out of a kitsch Heidi movie, all frilly wood, and the menu offered in English “half- fermented trout with all its belongings” and “weal”. We questioned the waitress. “That is a baby cow,” she said, sadly.
For our Big Night Out, when one of the Neilson reps came to babysit, we went to the famous buffet banquet at the Dr Holms Hotel. The hotel had once been a Victorian sanitorium for the tubercular rich, and is the nearest thing that Geilo has to grandeur. There are plenty of stuffed mooseheads in the cocktail bar. The buffet was vast, and a little terrifying. We ate reindeer and even slivers of whalemeat, which tasted like salty, fishy roast beef.
Still, we didn’t go for the cuisine, and the holiday was enormously successful on our terms. We felt safe throwing the children outside on their own to build snowmen, and one wonderful day was spent riding dogsleds around the frozen lake. The children loved the huskies and cuddled the blue-eyed Samoyed dogs, and we hurtled along, with the youngest wrapped in reindeer- skin rugs in the sleds. Then we went back to the cabin, and sat in our sauna, and turned from cold grey to bright pink, like large, happy prawns.
Need to know
