Anniversary Getaway to The Zermatt

To celebrate 3 lovely, adventurous years of marriage, Jake and I ate at The Olive Garden on a Tuesday. And then that weekend was when the real fun began! (Don't get me wrong, I love Olive Garden and I loved my parmesan tilapia, soup and breadsticks. But we did have Cami with us, and Jake had planned this awesome getaway for the weekend, so we were both looking forward to that.)

If you've never heard of, seen, or been to The Zermatt resort in Midway, UT...you're missin out! Maybe it's my inner German who is so fond of the swiss atmosphere, but I just loved it. We dropped Cami off with her Grandma and Grandpa Yospe (with whom she had a blast), and drove to Midway in the freeezing cold dead of winter. We got there at about 6, just in time to enjoy dinner at Matty's Bistro. Part of our overnight stay included a food voucher, which I was most excited about. :) We could have gone to the fancy restaurant to partake in the Friday night seafood buffet, but at 40 bucks a person, that was a little out of our league!

But check out this goodness: Mmmmmmmm. Commence drooling. This is a plate of bratwurst on a nice big roll with sauerkraut, grainy mustard, pickle, and the best part: English chips. These chips were to die for! They were like super thinly sliced potatoes, fried until they were hot and crisp, but still a little chewy. I want to go back, just for those chips. And Jake got a Matty's burger with super yummy fries.

The chairs and the decorations made me feel like I was back in Germany again!

Aaarrrrrrrrmmmmp. (That's the sound of me taking a huge bite). It took me forever to finish my meal, but I did it! The waiter came by like 5 times to see if we needed anything, and I apologized for being a slow eater. But it was nice to have lotsa time, and good conversation with Jake.

Check out the couch upholstery in our room! I loved it, it made me laugh when we first walked in. Here's the outside of the hotel. We took a stroll for as long as we could stand the 0 degree weather!

That night, we put on our swimsuits and headed to the pool like 2 excited little schoolkids. They had a hot tub with a big waterfall coming down from the ceiling, and a heated pool that went through a tunnel to the outside. We decided to be brave and go outside to the other hot tub, but on the pool deck we were slippin and slidin on ice, and the hot tub turned out to be lukewarm. Lame. I took a bath back in our room with their yummy oatmeal soap (I love hotel toiletries, it's always so fun to open and use them all) and we drank hot chocolate. Delightful.

This was the view outside our window in the morning.

The building on the left with the big windows on the bottom is where the pool is, with the spa/fitness center on the top 2 floors. Such a pretty place, tucked into the mountains!

That poor bear has some icicle sideburns. It was COLD.

Mmm hmmmm. I loved the look of this frozen fountain. I did not actually lick it.

The other great part about the place is their bakery with pastries galore and yummy gelato. I got an apple turnover, which was scrumptious, and Jake got a cheese danish to enjoy on the way to our next destination.

Here's the firplace/mantle in the hotel lobby. We ate a continental breakfast on the balcony ovelooking it. I have no idea what that statue situation is, but it looks cool.

After checking out and as we were on our way to the train station, we came across these beauties!

They're called the Midway Ice Castles, and it was just right along the road and we turned around and went back so I could take pictures from the fence. They charge like 7 bucks for people to go in and get a closer look, but this sufficed for us.

It was a complete winter wonderland that morning, with trees covered in complete white. It was so beautiful!

We stopped at this random spot to take pictures and walk across this cool bridge.

And then we arrived at the Heber Valley Railroad station. My first time riding this train, it was a fun little adventure!

Yay for cozy beanies and morning faces! This is the train we rode on.

We did the train n' tubin deal where you take an hour train ride and then get dropped off at a point and take a bus to the tubing hill at Soldier Hollow. The train ride was nice...they don't call it the Heber Creeper for nothin! It's super slow, cuz it's so old and rickety, but there was lots to see and beautiful white snow covering everything! We passed this frozen reservoir where tons of ice fishermen were camped out. People were ice fishing all over the place! Doesn't seem like my cup of tea.

The ice had these interesting lines stretching out across it, I guess from cracks and things, but it looked really cool.

We saw soooo many deer, holy cow! Dozens were prancing around everywhere we looked. There was a cute family from Florida that would get so excited when any animal would pop up. Eagles were flying overhead as well. Can you spot the deer in this one?

Here's some more!

From the train, to the bus, to the tubing hill, we hopped on our tubes and got hooked up to the pulley system which made me feel so lazy! But I'm so glad it's there. It's a big hill!

Little Jakey hangin out.

Nerd.

I was so scared when we went down our first hill together. It felt like I was gonna fly out, or that my feet would hit the side and knock me out. But alas, the whole hour and a half that we were there, not one person wiped out. It's super safe. We went down by ourselves once, but I liked hooking together and going faster. We got some pretty good distance, almost making it to the fence at the end!

The bus picked up our group and took us back to the train station, and then we left Midway and drove through Park City. It was kind of snowing/raining, so we didn't get out, but we drove down Main Street and saw this house with massive snow on the roof! Jake thinks the house is caving in.

And this was totally random....we turned around so that we could get a picture of it. Trees FULL of pairs of shoes! Think of how many needy people would benefit from those shoes! But it is kinda cool to see from the busy road.

Ahhh. Picture perfect.

I love this picture! It belongs in a snow globe. We finished off the weekend with lunch and a movie in Salt Lake. We saw "How Do You Know", which we both really liked, and then picked up our little Cami Lamb. We totally missed her, but she didn't want to leave Grandma and Grandpa's house! I guess that's ok though. Anyways, it was a wonderful weekend, and a perfect mini vacation with my boy.