Kathleen and Brad: Niigata Skiing

Chris' student Yuuta took Brad and I, Chris and his girlfriend Yoko, Orchid, Chris' American coworker and Noriyuki, another student skiing last weekend. We had to get up super early and drove 2-3 hours to get to Niigata from Akishima. It was raining the whole way and then we went through the longest road tunnel in Japan called Kanetsu tunnel which is about 6 miles long. Before we went into the tunnel it was rainy and green, on the other side there was 10 feet of snow on either side of us and it was snowing. Also, instead of watch out for deer crossing signs, there were watch out for monkey crossing signs. Crazy! We didn't see any monkeys though. Brad and I didn't bring any ski clothes with us so we made due with what we had and were able to rent some ski pants along with our ski's at the mountain.

This was the morning after the big earthquake in Chile when Japan was on tsunami alert. We didn't experience any ramifications from the earthquake besides there being A LOT of traffic on the way home (it took us about 5 hours to get home). Yuuta said that was the worst traffic he ever experienced. We looked online and Japan only had about a 4 inch tsunami from the earthquake but they did evacuate some coastal areas. And just in case anybody is worried, we are not near the ocean at all so hopefully nothing like that will effect us.

To end the day we went to a great hot springs place before our long ride home. Brad and I thought we weren't going to ski this year since we are in Japan, but we are very glad we got to go!

The main lodge. First we had to take a ski lift from the rental place to this lodge, then you had to go down the bunny slopes before taking the ski lifts up the mountain to better skiing.