We spent the last week of January in Vail. We flew to Denver where we rented a car. It only took a couple of hours to reach our destination. We stayed at the Vail Marriott Resort, located in Lionshead near the lifts. We had a large room with a fireplace and a balcony facing the slopes. Lionshead has a lot of shops and restaurants. The hotel has a free shuttle that takes you to Vail Village.
We booked our ski rental equipment online, which saves a few dollars. After picking our skis up we went to have a quick bite at Bart & Yeti’s, a famous local pub and restaurant.
Our ski passes have been booked online, so on our first day of skiing we were able to go directly to the gondolas. It was a week day and the lines were very fast. We really enjoyed these few days skiing in the Vail Resort area. They have slopes for every type of skiers, from beginners to experts. Other ski areas in Colorado do not offer such a wide variety of choices. If you like black runs, Vail is known for its legendary seven Back Bowls. They have a few restaurants on the slopes, but they are pricey and not very good. Most of the time we skied back down to Lionshead and had lunch on the terrace at Garfinkel's, a favorite of locals and tourists.
Vail has a large choice of restaurants for dinner. Most of the one we tried were good. We had Mexican at El Sabor, Indian at Annapurna Nepali & Indian Cuisine and American at Vail Chophouse. Being born in Switzerland I wanted to try the Swiss Chalet, one of Vail’s Village best known restaurants. It was very disappointing. The food was average, the place was very noisy with a lot of kids. They brought our main course before our appetizer…Not what you expect when you spend that kind of money. They told us they were having a bad night, which happens.
The snow conditions were not that great for the season. Locals blamed la Niña. Some parts of the slopes were very icy, which caused my wife, who is an average skier, to crash when she hit an ice patch. The ski patrol was very helpful and took her on a snowmobile to the closest gondola down to the village, where she went to the local hospital. Upon returning home, we learned she tore her ACL and MCL, and three places in her shoulder. That was a bad end to our vacation! We love Vail and will return, but we will be more careful to check snow conditions before our next visit and make sure all future ski trips have "good" snow before venturing out.

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