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!
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