There is skiing in Spain, decent skiing. And Andorra is close by with great skiing to be had. But this post is not about skiing per se. It’s about when to go skiing, and more importantly, when not to go skiing.

You see, last weekend we hit the slope of Cerler, in the Aragonese mountains. We wanted to try somewhere new, as Andorra is the usual group trip we do many times a winter season and we needed our horizons broadened. We planned this particular trip over three weeks ago, which is well in advance for most adults planning a weekend getaway, so we should have noticed the red flags, which are as follows:

1. No hotels were available for Friday night. None. We had to book a place 50km away for Friday and move to a place at the bottom of the slopes Saturday night.
2. There had not been any holidays for a few weeks, that’s unusual, there is usually some kind of holiday every two weeks or so.

Those two things above should have been enough to prompt us to check …is there some kind of holiday going on?

And of course there was. While there was not a holiday in the province I live in, in Aragon, there was. And it was the worst possible kind: a four day school holiday in the middle of winter.

Thousands of children clogged the slopes. Dozens of ski instructors, each with another dozen children zigzagging at a snail’s pace the full width of every slope covered the mountain. Lines out the door at every lodge. Hotel pool so noisy with piercing shrieks one had to plug the ears while walking through to the sauna. Breakfast buffet swimming in germs from the tiny, sticky fingers traveling from mouths, eyes, and noses to the bread baskets and stacks of cheese.

We skied. We helped haul children onto ski lifts. We dodged beginner snowboarders going far faster than they wanted to be going and parents screeching to a halt mid slope–and always directly in front of us–to locate their children. We ping-ponged our way through the coffee lines and spoke sharply to gaggles of teenagers to stop pounding on the lunch tables. We endured.

And we most definitely learned our lesson.