Holidays in the same place: boring or beautifully familiar?
Dear Evelin, you regularly go on holiday with your family to a place where your husband used to go when he was a child. What's it like?
Benjamin Muschg
Dear Ben, do you know the «Kochelexpress»? It's a 160 metre long open-air water slide. And do you know who has slid down it 100,000 and 1 times? My husband. As a boy. And he told me about it with shining eyes, perhaps not quite so often, but often enough to feel like he knew this area inside out: the aforementioned water slide, the Trimini family pool with its breathtakingly beautiful view of Lake Kochelsee, the Herzogstand, the moorland landscape that stretches out just a few metres behind the Bavarian farms.
In the 1970s, my parents-in-law bought a small holiday flat in the village of Ort, around two kilometres from Kochel am See. 160 people live here and twice as many cows, chickens and horses - the balance to life in the big city. The children are small. Here, the two boys learn to ski, mountain climbing in summer and, of course, swimming.
«You know, we kept running up the steep slope. We raced down the winding tube again and again.» When you're 6, 160 metres is a small eternity. In the evening, the boys listen to the voices of the holiday guests: «Yes, the weather is good .... It's supposed to get even hotter tomorrow.»
The only telephone box in the village is down by the road in front of the children's bedroom window. The two of them are lying in their bunk beds with their names carved into the wood. It was incredibly cosy, my husband says.
But as children grow up, they want to see more of the world. Weekends in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps become rarer, and in the summer holidays the sons go canoeing on the Ardèche and cycling across Scotland. When you're 15, 160 metres is short.
I enter this world for the first time on a weekend in the summer of 2004. Not much has changed here since his childhood, says my husband, who is still my boyfriend at the time. Our first daughter was born in 2012. Three years later, her sister. Now, at the latest, we appreciate the predictability of this holiday destination.
Children's crockery is stored in the kitchen, the old wooden sledge has always been waiting to be used in the cellar and the number of the neighbouring riding stables owner has long been saved in our contacts: «Call me a week before you come and I'll plan your daughter into the lessons».
And when holiday flats and hotel rooms become scarce and expensive as the high season approaches, we don't have to worry about anything. We are always free to travel to Kochel.
We know which good restaurant is next to the best playground and that the most delicious cakes can be found in the nearby organic cheese shop. And not at the bakery chain in the village centre.
Previously published in the section «We ask ourselves»:
- Editor-in-chief Nik Niethammer answers the question: Dear Nik, do your children still believe in Father Christmas and the Christ Child?
- Editor-in-chief Florina Schwander answers the question: Dear Florina, do your twins get the same presents for Christmas?
- Senior writer Claudia Landolt answers the question: How does it feel to be a woman with five men and a dog?
- Deputy editor-in-chief Evelin Hartmann answers the question: How do you manage bilingualism between High German and Swiss German?
- Patrik Luther, Deputy Publishing Director, answers the question: What is it like when the children have a big age difference?
- Florian Blumer, Head of Production, answers the question: How do you manage to divide work, family and household equally?
- Bianca Fritz, Head of Online, answers the question: What is it actually like to work for a parenting magazine when you are (still) childless?
- Sales Manager Jacqueline Zygmont answers the question: How does it work to let go when your son (20) is slowly fledging?
- Sales Manager Corina Sarasin answers the question: How is the relationship with your godchildren?
- Publishing assistant Dominique Binder answers the question: What is it like to grow up as an only child?
- Managing Director of Stiftung Elternsein, Thomas Schlickenrieder, answers the question: Family in different time zones: What is it like when your son is studying abroad?
- Author Claudia Landolt answers the question: What to cook for four gluttonous boys?
- Sales Manager Renata Canclini gives tips on how to make life work as a patchwork family.
- Foundation Secretary Éva Berger explains how she went from being a full-time mum back to working full-time.
- Benjamin Muschg, Head of Production, gives tips on what you should bear in mind as an unmarried couple with children.
It's right for the whole family.
My childhood memories look different. The big caravan sits in our garage driveway for three days before we set off, fully loaded: one summer to Sweden, the next to France and then to Greece. Hundreds of kilometres, with a different campsite every few days.
It's super cool for me and my sister. A summer holiday means breakfast under the pine trees, new friends from all over the world and queuing (for minutes) for a shower.
Do I miss this kind of travelling? Yes, sometimes I do. But apart from all the glorification, it has to be said: as nice as this camping romance was for us children, it was often quite exhausting for my mum. My sister and I were also small at the beginning.
In addition to the summer holidays, there are other holidays and long weekends where you can travel to other places. We do that and my husband's family did the same.
What's really great is that it's not just the children who are slowly starting to feel like a (second) home. For the first time this summer. It was at the end of a long, hot holiday day, on the way from the car to «our» holiday flat, the bags with the wet swimsuits slung over my shoulder, my eyes fixed on the girls.
«Mum, let's go first!» Children laughing, jumping, a cockerel strutting across the road. A kitschy, beautiful picture, captured in the family album.
