Japan 2023 - Days 14 and 15

There isn't heaps to report from these two days as it was travel and then skiing with no-one being kind enough to provide me with blog-fodder. what a disgrace. In fact it was so exciting that one night Bel decided the best thing she could do was Japanese Where's Wally!

Travelling to Shiga Kogen meant travelling by train from Kyoto to Iiyama (with a stop at Nagano) and then by bus to Shiga Kogen itself. So that’s exactly what we did. We’d sent our ski equipment through ahead of us, so the luggage issue wasn’t too bad and the trip was uneventful though we did say goodbye to Sam for a couple of days as he’d opted to go elsewhere and meet up with us again to ski in Nozawa Onsen.

For dinner a local ‘pub’ selling Mexican food was selected. It turned out to be expensive and disappointing, but that’s one of the chances you take when travelling around. They can’t all be winners.

With only a single full day to ski, the Rowlands opted to rest weary legs and avoid the task of hiring and returning equipment, which left Caroline, Thomas Emily and I to ski. As usual we didn’t quite get the early start I’d have liked and Caroline had boot issues early which made her wonder if she was going to be able to ski at all, but we eventually sorted them out (utterly stress and hassle free of course – and I was calm, patient and … well none of those things really) and managed to make it onto the slopes.

We’d skied at Shiga Kogen twice previously and everyone other than Emily had at some point skied a run which we remembered as the Men’s Downhill which had been used during the 1998 Nagano Olympics. Emily hadn’t been willing to ski it on those occasions, but with vastly improved skills was dead keen to give it a go this time. So first up we headed up tot the top of the mountain and negotiated our way back down. It was everything I remembered, groomed, but on the bloody steep side of things. We all safely negotiated it and Emily was happy to have finally ticked that off her list of desired achievements. The weather was quite spectacular for the day and we worked our way up down, across and around the mountain, travelling as far as the place we’d stayed on our first trip there and ending in our happy place in Ichinose.

The Rowlands spent the day on a tour to see the snow monkeys and we all met up for dinner upon their return. The day ended with rain, which was a first for us in the mountains and certainly made our decision not to ski the following morning before travelling out again a better decision than we could have imagined at the time.