Day 165 in Japan - Tsugaike skiing

Sadly, after doing his knee a bit yesterday, Simon sat out again today. I think he made a good call, because it was a harder day of skiing today. We had a lot of snow last night, which continued to fall today, which made for absolutely beautiful snow, but really poor visibility, and some really deep snow drifts to navigate. Jodie ad Fiona joined us again today, and it was nice to have the girls around, even if we did split off from them to head higher up the slopes fairly early.

Tsugaike was an awkward resort to navigate - it was a lot bigger than Iwatake, but we had to do lots of awkward traversing to get across to try various slopes. Would have been a nice place to find a good spot on the mountain and stick to for a few hours, but I think we must have skied on about 70-80% of the slopes all up - I don't know if we repeated anything more than a few times.

One odd thing we saw today was the KFC Colonel riding on the gondola. We thought it was odd enough when we saw a KFC on the snow - it's odd in Australia to see a major fast food chain on snow. But then we were riding the gondola up the mountain and spotted the colonel riding his own sled strung up on the gondola line, riding up and down the mountain. Weird advertising. But we did eat KFC for lunch, so maybe it worked?

After today's skiing, we decided we needed to go to the onsen to soak away some of our aches. It was so, so beautiful - they had an outdoor bath, and we sat in the hot water with snow falling al around us looking up into the night sky. We even went for a quick roll in the freshly fallen snow, and threw some snowballs over the wall into the boys side of the onsen, along with our new friend from Cairns (Linda). It was really wonderfully relaxing, so relaxing that I was pretty much walking home asleep. No photos of this bit, of course.

Food Highlight of the Day: Catching snowflakes on my tongue in the open air onsen. Absolutely as lame as it sounds, but also just as fun.