Ishiuchi

We had another great snowboarding trip, this time to Ishiuchi. It's in the same area of mountain ranges, in Yuzawa. We took the same train as we did last time but chose a closer resort to the station. Accomodations were great, they picked uw up in a van from the station, the rooms were western style, we had our own bathroom, and breakfast in the morning. They didn't speak much English but we managed. We went up early Saturday morning, dropped off our stuff and went straight to the lift which was right behind the hotel. At first we thought the mountain was pretty small, but then we just kept taking lift after lift to different parts of the mountain and higher up. It turned out to be fairly big, we pretty much explored all different trails. Weather was beautiful, fairly warm and sunny and the snow was great. Powdery in some areas, packed in others but soft. Unfortunately Kenn caught the cold I had last week so we only rode until the early afternoon. It was a great day though.

I tried out the onsen/public bath in our hotel. Since it was early in the afternoon, no one was in there. It was really nice and relaxing. We didn't book dinner reservations at our hotel in advance (didn't realize we needed to) and there wasn't really much else in the area. So we ended up eating ramen in the room and drinking chu-his from the vending machine all night. :)

Sunday morning was gloomy and it looked like it had been raining. Since Kenn wasn't feeling well, we decided to just head home. There's this awesome service in Japan called takkyubin where they mail/messenger your bags or snowboard gear to/from the resort. We figured out how to do it and didn't have to lug all our heavy gear back home! The crazy thing is that it only costs like $10 and there's no weight limit. It's so weird, Kenn and I can't figure out why they have such a service here and how it can be profitable. But we're not complaining.

We'll get our pics up soon, there are some really great ones because the weather was so nice. More details to come...