Hotel Panorama, SudTirol, “Italy”

We’re in a super comfortable lodge perched just above the northern Italian town of Tschars, just below two stupendous, snowy ridges of the Alps. It’s more Austrian then it is Italian, the whole of this region having been part of Austria until the end of the first World War. So that means that the hotel restaurant plays alpine schlager hits and the female hotel staff wears Dirndls. Yesterday, we took a cable car way-the-fuck-up these steep mountain walls, then hiked back down. For six hours. We have mountain goats for daughters.

It helps that we’re here with our favorite other Ethiopian-Austrian family. Adinah and V. probably never would have hiked like they did without their pals Teresa and Emily. But still: V. is just 3 ½ years old. And even though she cried and whined at times, she walked almost the whole way down by herself. For a kiddo who probably sees no point at all in clambering down a near-vertical slab of rock and scrub brush, that’s six hours of heroic effort.

Last night at the dinner table, in an effort to summarize her day, V. took a skewer and jabbed it into a giant chunk of her schnitzel, turned it upside down and started flying it around the room. “Look,” she laffed, “I’m a cable car.”