Dad was turning sixty and still skis hard, so this had to be a ski week rather than a resort week.
Zermatt has no cars. Everything moves by small electric taxi or e-bike, with skis dropped into racks outside. Our guide, Vita, met us two hours later than planned because the rental queue ran long and the gondola alone is thirty-five minutes. She picked the lunch spot on the first day, which is most of what you hire a guide for.
The night toboggan run is four kilometres down to the village and there is exactly one street light on the whole thing, right at the end where you come into town. Twenty-five minutes in the dark, steering with your feet.
Two of us signed up for the cold plunge. A train up the mountain, a guide who talked us through breathing before anything else, and a hole in a frozen lake that had taken an hour and a half to cut open by hand that morning. My mother was sceptical and did not think she could do it. She came out calling it one of the best things she has ever done outdoors.
The one dinner I booked months ahead was the Michelin-starred one, and it is the part of the week I would change. Potato-skin soup made from kitchen waste, beetroot with unripe grape, three and a half hours at the table. My mother's verdict, asked directly, was "interesting." We are not a fine-dining family. What we did enjoy was the speed-walking race back to the hotel afterwards.
On the last day the connection to Cervinia was open and the sun was out, so we skied across the border into Italy for mushroom tagliatelle and a tiramisu, and were back on the Swiss side for the birthday toast.