Georgie Banfield’s daughters, 12 and 14, had never seen snow.
So she flew them to the Austrian Alps for 24 hours to fix that.
What they got was a white-out thick enough to swallow the mountain.
They refused to come inside.
It started with a Christmas film
Last winter, Florence, 14, and Arabella, 12, were watching Home Alone and Elf when they announced they wanted a proper snowball fight, the kind they’d only ever seen on screen.
Their mum took it from there.
“I got a bee in my bonnet about it and decided I had to give them this essential life experience,” said Georgie, 43, a marine biologist and senior research associate at the University of Portsmouth.
She’d been following the Extreme Day Trips Facebook page for two years, watching other people cram entire foreign adventures into a single day.
Then she found easyJet flights from Gatwick to Innsbruck for £35 each and stopped watching.
A 4am alarm and a mountain by lunchtime
Georgie still sounds slightly stunned by the speed of it.
“To think we had started our day at 4am in England and by midday we were at the top of a mountain playing in snow and having lunch in a mountainside restaurant,” she said.
The snow, when it came, came hard.
“There was a massive white-out and visibility was terrible,” she said.
The girls did not care. They jumped into the fresh powder and threw snowballs, running around, she said, “like puppies bounding around.”
What surprised her was that it landed at all, at their age.
“When your kids are 12 and 14 you assume they’re not going to be that fussed,” she said.
“Their reactions were so wonderful and full of genuine joy. They played for about an hour in the snow even though it was freezing.”
Between snowball fights they rode funiculars and cable cars up to Hungerburg, Seegrube and Hafelekar, taking in the Nordkette range, snow-covered trees and the river below.
They ate stews, schnitzels and hot chocolates.
“We all just stared out the window the whole way up,” she said.
The phones barely came out, beyond checking train times.
“Instead we chatted and giggled and played,” Georgie said.
Why Easter, not Christmas
A festive trip would have made more sense. It didn’t happen, because Georgie’s husband is in the Navy and lives away for much of the year.
When he’s home on Christmas leave, he wants to stay home.
So she waited for the Easter holidays and went without him.
The 24-hour format meant the girls barely missed the English spring anyway.
“I was determined to fulfil the girls’ dreams of seeing proper snow, so it was a sacrifice we were willing to make,” she said.
As a military wife who usually solo-parents, the uninterrupted time mattered as much as the snow.
What it cost
After a night at a hotel called B(l)ack Home and more sightseeing the next morning, the whole thing came to £749.58.
The breakdown:
- Flights (return, all three): £264.79
- Gatwick parking: £51.40
- Innsbruck card: about £120
- Hotel: £115.76
- Lunch up the mountain: £68.75
- Dinner in town: £95.22
- Breakfast: £30.20
- Airport sweets: £3.46
“Now that I’ve added it up it seems rather a lot at face value, however I can’t put a price on the adventure we had,” Georgie said.
Why it matters
The extreme day trip and its cooler cousin, the coolcation, have quietly become content categories of their own.
Budget-extreme micro-adventures travel well online because they’re aspirational and attainable at the same time, and the framing writes itself: I did this, for this much, in 24 hours.
Communities like Extreme Day Trips have done for cheap foreign jaunts what Instagram once did for brunch, turning a niche habit into something people copy.
Georgie isn’t a creator, but the appetite she tapped is exactly what travel creators are chasing now.
As European summers get hotter, demand is sliding toward the cold: co-ownership platform MYNE says enquiries for properties in the French and Austrian Alps have risen 110% and 98% over two years, as travellers trade heatwaves for snow.
Georgie hopes she’s handed her daughters a taste for adventure.
Whether that means more £35 flights, more white-outs and more 4am alarms, she’ll find out soon enough.
