Sunday morning and we walked up to Tokyo Station, with our luggage, looking all the other Japanese pushing around cases. Rosie and I booked the train tickets the day before to make sure we knew what we were doing, so the experience of finding our train was relatively painless. Once on the platform we were advised to line up to make sure we got to use the luggage space at the front. This didn’t really work, but on reflection, there was plenty of room above our seats to put our cases so this is better and safer.
Hopped off train in Nagano and then had a taxi booked to take us to Hakuba, which was very pleasant. Arrived to a warm 13°C and got hot with all our warm clothing on.
We were all quite pleased with our hotel, not fancy but better than everyone expected (allowing Bruce to book hotels is always dangerous). The view from all our rooms is great, we can watch people ski down the mountain and in the evening we can watch the snow plows getting the runs ready for us the next day. Everyone got up the next morning excited to go skiing and also excited to see what we got for breakfast. Breakfast was disappointing after the first hotel, this was only cereal, toast and croissants (if you were quick enough, they were not replenished).
Started off well, remembered all our gear and walked 300m to the beginners slopes. Up the first chairlift since this took us to an easy green run and then everyone went skiing down the hill to see what they could remember. Most did well, but unfortunately Rosie couldn’t cope with boots they had to give her. To be able to do them up they were way too big and this meant her feet swam around inside the boot unable to put pressure into the turns. She stopped after this first run.
After a few runs, Merv and Bruce went exploring and found the snow up at the higher levels to be much better so we took everyone up to the higher slopes. Off down the green (easy) run to keep everyone happy, but unfortunately Shaun had a fall and by the time Bruce got him moving again we had lost the rest of the group. No problems we just kept going where we thought we should go. Got lost, went up a different chairlift, still lost, went up a different chairlift and then found the top of the mountain where the gondola stopped. Met everyone at the top of the gondola and continued on.
Merv and Bruce rapidly found that they were not as young as last time they skied and got tired pretty quickly so stopped around 2 pm, went home and Bruce promptly fell asleep. All up a good start.
