For years Mandy had suggested we visit Zermatt or Cervinia and in 2016 we finally did.
It was to prove to be memorable for a bad reason!
I'm writing this a year later, so it's a bit vague now, but we travelled out late January and had a fairly uneventful flight to Geneva and transfer to Zermatt.
Like Wengen, but perhaps not quite so, Zermatt delivers impressive scenery
Zermatt is pretty nice, a decent sized town with plenty of shops, restaurants and bars and easy access to the mountain (going up anyway!).
We stayed in the Chalet Mazot run by Ski World, right in the centre of town, by a bus stop and walking distance from the main lift in the centre of town.
Plentiful snow and sunshine a lot of the time!
The two chalet girls were great all week and the rep, too, was very helpful (as was to proved!).
We ventured out on the mountain the following day and found the snow OK, if a little sparse lower down.
Fortuately it snowed quite heavily that night and the following day we had plentiful fresh snow and glorious sunshine.
Matterhorn and friends
The Matterhorn dominates Zermatt whether you're in the town (here's the view from our bedroom window) or on any of the pistes.
Matterhorn dominates the area, even our room!
It's an impressive lump of rock and with some quite high winds at times (which closed the links to Cervinia for the first few days) snow and cloud whipped from it, to make it look like a smokey chimney most days!
Another view of Zermatt from the mountain in great weather
The skiing is mostly wide open, cruisey reds - motorway skiing, but the sun was shining and the snow was mostly good.
On the downsides, Zermatt is VERY dear (lunch being eye wateringly expensive even for a snack, which luckily we only needed with substantial breakfasts and dinners at the Chalet) and there's no way to actually ski DOWN to the resort.
The Matterhorn
You get quite close down a, tricky in places, Red run, but then stop a 100 feet or so above the resort and need to take a lift down to the town centre.
A run near the Matterhorn
One day, when the weather was gentler, we ventured over to Cervinia, but the runs there were even tamer than in Zermatt. Lunch was refreshingly good value, but we didn't feel the urge to return another day.
Lunch stop in Cervinia
Staying in a chalet in Zermatt, we had a night out for dinner and fancied something simpler than the food we got there.
We came across the Time Out Sports bar wandering around one and the burgers sounded quite good. We returned later and found the sports bar attractively laid out in a very 'diner like' style.
The owner, an Englishman (we didn't know this when we entered, lest you fear it's a 'Brit bar', most of the other customers seemed to be local, I think a family sounded Dutch) was very friendly and chatty, explaining how the local Christmas beer is chosen from a variety of local micro breweries.
When our burgers arrived we were extremely impressed, my wife going as far as to say it was the best she ever had and I struggle to think of a better one. They were wonderfully meaty and cooked to medium rare. Mine was a chilli topped burger, which was extremely tasty.
The beer was good too and we would have undoubtedly returned for more meals if we'd not been in a catered chalet. In fact,we planned to return for a beer later in the week, but sadly those plans were stymied...
The prices, by the way, were also far below other bars and restaurants in town and, whilst simple, I think you'd have been challenged to find better quality food in Zermatt at any price!
The Matterhorn in 'smokey chimney' mode
Sadly, on the final run of the penultimate day, with poor vis, Mandy managed to take a tumble on the Red leading back to town. I wasn't with her at the time, we often split up, but she managed to snap her ACL and MCL.
Somehow she got off the mountain and made her way back to the chalet, where the rep proved to be excellent and was taking her off to the Doctor as I came back an hour or so later.
The cog railway up to the Observatory
The value of good travel insurance (I fully recommend InsureandGo)was proven too as we got all the in resort treatment covered (eventually, our credit car took a bit of a pounding in resort, although it could have been a hell of a lot worse if she'd been stretchered off the mountain!) and they arranged for 3 seats for Mandy on a BA flight (we were scheduled to be on a Monarch flight originally) and the cabin crew were great as were the assistance staff at Gatwick.
Sadly, that seems to be the end of Mandy's skiing days. Unlike me she wasn't determined to get back to skiing (having talked of giving up for a number of years anyway) and, whilst she's doing most of the things she did before the accident a year on, the knee still gives her pain and certainly isn't stable (The ACL has not been reconstructed, on the advice of the consultant who advised her to cope without more surgery).
The last shot of Mandy on skis?
Conclusion
Our memories of Zermatt are, of course, a bit tainted by Mandy's accident (my Dad was extremely ill at the time too, so it wasn't as relaxing as it may have been as I never really knew what news a call home might bring), but whilst we quite enjoyed it and the Matterhorn delivered some imposing scenery, it's not a resort I think we would have returned to, even if Mandy had wanted to ski again.
Mandy manages a smile at Gatwick!
A year on, it was beginning to look like I, too, may be hanging up my ski boots (at least for a season), but Lauren and I have a few days in Garmisch (a place we used to visit 25 years ago and I'd always wanted to return to) booked in early March, so fingers crossed for some snow there!
