Family COVID Winter At Home

Dec 2020 to Feb 2021 – So to be honest, thanks to Germany’s insane overdoing of restrictions in all aspects of life regarding living within COVID’s reaches (in addition to totally messing up the vaccine roll-out), we, as a family, lost all hope of a regular winter. As is obvious in my walk up the Nebelhorn, my wandering around Feldberg, or our renting of a private lift, we (mostly me) have been trying to make the best of the situation. In addition to being pushed to these new lengths for snow, COVID also made me realize that the American community in Germany is filled with some of the worst people I’ve ever come across.

If you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance you’re not one of those people.

Our home in Baden-W has plenty of places to enjoy real slopes; however, any of you with kids knows that getting them to hike up to shred a slope will present its own unique and frustrating challenges. These challenges led us to get creative and, thus, the Holzgerlingen Piste/Slope area was born.

Landkreis Böblingen near Stuttgart isn’t exactly what anyone thinks of when it comes to a family ski and snowboard zone; however, we found out that it’s possible to get some enjoyment close to our back garden. Just between Holzgerlingen and Mauren lies an absolute perfect gentle sloping hillside that we visited countless times this winter.

Moving on to our next discovery was an unusual attempt at snowboarding and ski’ing in “The Boob”.

The Schönbuchturm is prominently situated high atop the trees of the Schönbuch Naturpark. Generally, people enjoy climbing up the tower’s three levels for a pretty stunning panorama of the entire Landkreis to include the wonderful Schwabisch Alb (on clear days). However, desperation to enjoy the snow drove us to this interesting spot.

As long as there aren’t many pedestrians walking up towards the tower, this is an interesting little 30-40 second run. It’s thin, steep, and even has some stairs and rails if you’re insane enough to try park features in such a small area.

The entire Schönbuch Naturpark is actually filled with plenty of places to take small runs if you’re willing to walk some. That comment leads me to the next video snippet.

I’ve never tried utilizing ski poles while on a snowboard, but again, Germany’s war on small business and its own people drove me to new things, this winter. The below video clip is just a little shoutout to the Naturpark and how accessible and well suited it is for “cross-country snowboarding” (more correctly skiing).

To be totally honest, if you’ve made it this far, you’ve realized this is a bit of a filler post. The feeling in writing this post is very fitting for what this COVID Winter felt like: just trying to get by, trying our best to do our winter things in a new way, and making our very best efforts to just to stay busy.

I wouldn’t expect anyone outside of our local area to ever come experience these little spots that we found. What I do hope this does for at least one reader is to provide some hope that, if this COVID garbage doesn’t go away soon, next Winter you can at least do what we did……drink some beers and make the best of it. Until next Winter……