I think the saddest part of sitting to write this is that we’re already up to days 8 and 9. It means that the end is closer than the beginning of the holiday and I’m having too much fun for it to end.
Yesterday was once again a travel day as we headed back to the mountains to try skiing in a different resort. The thought was that we’d give the legs a rest for a few days and then have another go rather than ski ourselves into oblivion by over-doing it. The significant amounts of walking that we did around Tokyo may have somewhat defeated this purpose, especially in relation to Caroline’s knee.
We gathered all our belongings and cleared out our pokey hotel rooms (when I told Michael the rooms where pokey he asked what I meant, claiming that he’d never heard the expression before – kids these days!) and then Thomas, Sam and I set off to do a bit of last minute shopping intended to avoid a return to Akihabara when we spend another couple of days in Tokyo.
Thomas has been on the lookout for ‘something cool’ to take back to Australia and was most disappointed when prices on GoPros and their equivalents weren’t cheaper than what we can get them for in Oz. I suggested that perhaps he’d like to invest in a model train as I had the last time that we were over here and that little seed began to germinate. I was going to buy some track to extend on what I had and with a bit of investigation of what was available, Thomas decided that if we teamed up, things would be even better. So that is exactly what we did.
We had our eyes on a couple of games as well that we hoped to get tax free, but on our return to the store where we’d seen them a couple of days earlier, they’d been sold out! Talk about frustrating.
We rejoined Caroline, Michael and Emily and then set off for the train station. It was nearing lunchtime and knowing that we several hours on the train and bus ahead of us, we stopped at a bakery to ensure that everyone was well fed. We stocked up and fed and then headed down to board the train to Nagano. At Nagano we remembered to take out some cash to take with us and hopped onto the bus with minutes to spare.
The trip to Hakuba took a different route than that to Shiga-Kogen and so we had a different view as we travelled. It was picturesque with the road following a river for a reasonable amount of the journey. The fact that snow had been falling and everything was blanketed in a fresh dusting of pristine white snow.
The forecasts that I had seen for the area were predicting between two and three metres of snow over the 6 days to come, so it was no surprise when it was snowing when we disembarked at the Hakuba train station. Caroline contacted the hotel and a shuttle came to bring us to the hotel.
The kids were pretty happy to see that they each had a bed in their room along with enough space to move and Caroline and I weren’t complaining about not having to share with any of them either!
The idea that we leave the hotel and walk in the snow (it hadn’t stopped falling from the sky) to find somewhere to have dinner was less popular, though everyone enjoyed their meals at a nearby hotel with a teppanyaki grill (even though Caroline and I were the only ones to order from it). Thomas was rather put out when the seafood pizza that he ordered came topped with corn. I perrsonally don't believe corn belongs on a pizza, but I wouldn't have bothered pulling each kernel off one at a time with chopsticks like Thomas did either!
Nor did I indulge in what everyone tells me was a delight, even though I thought it was an abomination: Apple pizza for dessert.
There were two things immediately noticeable in Hakuba. The place is over-run with Aussies and it’s a much more commercial set up than Shiga-Kogen. By that I mean that there’s a lot more retail shops and bars. It’s more of a town than Shiga Kogen which tends to be a collection of hotels and accommodation largely catering to significant numbers of Japanese kids in ski schools.
We weren’t about to judge it on the first day though. We retired to bed ready to get up and see what the weather would be like for our first day of skiing on the new mountain.
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