Active holiday in the snow: Winter triggers joy – and escape reflexes – travel

Those who love winter sports will find the best conditions right now. But what if skis, ice skates and toboggans can be stolen?

Finally cold. Finally snow in the mountains. Finally winter. The ski slopes are perfectly groomed, a number of toboggan runs are passable. Natural ice rinks tempt you to ice skate, trails to cross-country ski. If you want to go out into the open country with snowshoes or touring skis, you have to take the danger of avalanches seriously and avoid certain slopes – but the longed-for winter land is also open to this herd of self-proclaimed individualists.

So off to the Alps! Let’s go to the low mountain range! Actually? What if you don’t want any of that? The miserable snow, the lousy cold, the stinging wind. The lumps of yeast papier-mâché they sell you in cottages as yeast dumplings. The Zillertal womanizer-Music there. Wearing uncomfortable shoes for hours. The tedious lugging of the equipment with stiff, frozen fingers, which has previously drained half a week’s wages at the gondola cash desk. The bruises because you just got knocked off the sled again or pulled your feet away while ice skating.

There must be alternatives. At least you would like to think so. It just can’t be that winter is hard to escape from. How can it? Well, it looks like it. There is a special problem in Berlin, which is home to four to five percent of Germany’s population: the city’s airport doesn’t really live up to its name anyway. And now, when it is perhaps most urgent to go to warmer regions, it has been finally paralyzed by a warning strike. The suspicion: It won’t stay with this one strike, nor with the restriction to Berlin and air traffic. The post office is already in the mood for a strike, so the railways won’t be asked twice. All of this doesn’t make beating the winter any easier.

But even if planes should take off: where to fly? On Mallorca: there is snow. On the beaches of the Greek peninsula Halkidiki: there is snow. Of course, a bathing holiday here and there is out of the question anyway in February. But mild temperatures, which at least give you the idea that it could possibly be summer again at some point, yes. But even in India’s capital, Delhi – which is on the same level as the Canary Islands – the winter holidays have recently been extended because otherwise it would have been too cold for the students in the school buildings, which often cannot be heated.

Are there really only the tropics and the southern hemisphere left? And if: Do you want to – and can – overdo it to such an extent? Is there really nothing between a long-distance trip and a kitschy Caribbean-themed living room mural to unfreeze? It’s nothing. Let’s accept the inevitable. If the ice skates grind, the cross-country skis grow. Out into the cold, out of the comfort zone. Everything in life is a phase. Also the winter.