Japan 2023 - Day 5

Today was a travel day, with our itinerary set for us to travel from Tokyo to our first ski destination for the trip; Madarao.

It was the first time our full collective had travelled together with all our luggage in tow. We had two things in our favour. Sam, the super-organised one to help with navigation and tickets and the fact we’d made the trip before and knew to send our ski gear ahead of us. It mean that our skis, boots and ski-clothing had been shipped from the airport and would be waiting for our arrival in Madarao.

We lugged our collective possessions to the train station and up and down a few stairs (or in some cases, used the elevator) and after a bit of a false start all ended up in the same place, with tickets, ready to board the train. Almost miraculously, nothing went wrong and that’s exactly what we did. A transfer in Tokyo saw the Tembys on their first Shinkansen for the trip (having caught a local train from Haneda while the Rowlands had arrived into Narita and caught the Shinkansen to Tokyo).

I don’t think I’ll ever tire of travelling on the Shinkansen and can imagine one day simply purchasing the JR Pass and spending days just riding all over Japan. Our destination was Iiyama, where we transferred to a shuttle bus to take us up the mountain to Madarao itself.

We disembarked from the bus to be greeted by our first touchable snow of the trip, which for the Rowlands was the first time they’d seen it since they visited us in Canada. We collected our luggage and walked down the hill to our accommodation at Madarao Mountain Lodge to get checked in ahead of organising ski gear for all those who had to hire something.

I don’t think we’d been there for much more than an hour before Michael and Olivia had ventured out the back of the lodge and created a little slide and return stairway for themselves in the snow. Though short, the pitch was impressive! (don’t worry, you’ll see more on that in the days ahead since I’m playing catch up with this).

We were lucky that the lodge has a small restaurant and that dinner for the first night was sorted as Madarao, being small but busy, can prove difficult to book dinner reservations, and given there were twelve of us in total, we didn’t even expect to eat together every night.

Skis were hired and organised and we returned to the lodge. Thomas was itching to get out on his brand new skis and so went to the trouble of putting boots and skis on just to slide down the little run that Michael and Olivia had created earlier in the afternoon for their butts. He was pretty stoked to be the first of the party to get to ski.

The lodge has a small common room in the basement that we pretty much claimed for our own from that first night and thanks to a mix-up with dinner bookings, we ended up eating down there as well! It was definitely better than missing out altogether. After a couple of quiet drinks we decided to call it a day, ready to be up early to kit up and hit the slopes! There was even a small chance we’d see Sam in long pants for the first time on the trip!