Claire & Matt

We had a really nice visit with Auntie Claire. She was here for over a week. Matt was even able to come up for the weekend. They are heading back to Switzerland in a few hours. Yesterday was a bit of an adventure though...

Normally after a work week I am pretty wiped out and need to rest a lot. That wasn't an option yesterday as Claire and Matt wanted to go skiing with the girls. So we packed up our stuff and went. When we got there, the prices were double what we expected. That was disappointing at first, but it also meant that we could stay for twice as long, so that turned out alright.

We got in some good skiing, the girls were doing great, we had a nice lunch, skied more, Naomi and I actually got some time to ourselves as the girls were having so much fun with Claire and Matt. We decided to take one final run before having a snack and for some reason I decided to wait for Naomi partway down the hill. She is really slow.

Good thing I waited, because she got hit from behind by an out of control snowboarder. This is a pretty common occurrence at this very crowded hill with lots of beginners and drunk people, so their response was quite good. They shut down the hill, brought in the stretcher, and got her out into an ambulance. This took a while, so Naomi was freezing cold and in a lot of pain.

Claire went with her to the hospital while Matt and I had a snack with the girls. We had a lot of trouble finding them at the hospital, but Naomi ended up being alright. No broken bones, just a bad contusion on her shoulder and lots of bruises. She hit her head pretty hard too, but nothing really serious. She is in a sling for the better part of a week and can't do much of anything.

Two interesting observations came out of the experience. The whole morning we had been commenting on how incredibly rude people were. Dutch drivers constantly cutting us off on the autobahn, unfriendly employees taking our money at the ski hill, people cutting in front of us in the line for the tow rope, etc. As soon as Naomi got hurt, everyone we dealt with was incredibly friendly and helpful. Even the guy who hit her was doing everything he could to help out.

The second observation was that these past ten days, Naomi kept witnessing random, violent events. A car crash after yoga, a guy who dropped a brick on his hand, crushing it and spraying blood everywhere, and one or two other things. I told her to be careful, because she would be the next one in the ER. Hmmm...

They even had to cut up her brand new shirt!