|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Hike report by Akira
Despite the expensive cost of this trip, there were 13 people joined this trip. On Friday, Lutz drove a rental car from Hiratsuka to Tsukuba for an overnight stay at my apartment. I asked the rental agent to set the car navigation route to Tsukuba so that he can drive with ease. However, it turned out that the car navigation was set NOT to use highway and at every highway exit he comes across it says to turn off the highway. He called for my help and I navigated him over cell phone on late Friday night. Finally, he arrived at Tsukuba 11:00 pm.
Saturday: Meeting time was at 5am and everybody showed up right on time (wow)! We left Tsukuba at about 5.20am. Since the weather forecast said it will be sunny on Sat and snowy on Sun, cross country skiers decided to do downhill on 1st day. Everybody went to Kurohime ski resort and enjoyed downhill for the whole afternoon. The pension happened to have an insulated cozy room for piano and I enjoyed playing the piano. I haven't touched it for 2 years. I used to play the piano only by myself or for someone special, but now that it sucks, I decided to play only by myself for the rest of my life. :-) After having delicious dinner at the pension ALM, we went to a nice outside onsen. Then we had a small party at the cozy room. There was some argument on costs for the rental car, but we finally agreed on sharing the cost equally. Sometimes it is impossible to make a decision everybody agrees. Please understand that I tried to make a decision I thought would make everyone happy with limited time I can offer for organizing a TWMC trip. By the way, with less and less time I can offer for the organizing, I find it very difficult to organize a trip properly. I may have to step down from TWMC walk organizer post in September due to busy work schedule etc.
Sunday: 7 people (Dana, Jennifer, Lutz, Fritz, Melissa, Agneta and Akira) did cross country and 6(Luc, Alex, Mickael, Torea, Sebastien, Nadia?) did snowboarding or downhill on the 2nd day. Fortunately, the weather forecast was wrong and it was sunny all day. I felt very relaxed when I was skiing down the long cross country course with nice view. I could see snow monsters, beautiful beech forest and full perspective of surrounding mountains from the area. Cross country group went to another onsen before driving back to Tsukuba. Downhill skiers enjoyed skiing for the whole day. I arrived at Tsukuba at 10.40pm.
... and by Melissa & Agneta
Many thanks to the drivers and Akira for arranging this wonderful trip with fantastic weather and views and also snowmonsters of course. Since Agneta and I first read about skiing in Japan and realized that on Zao mountain there are snowmonsters we wanted to go there and see them. It is always a thrilling experience to finally reach such a place and we were not disappointed. They looked great ! like big dogs or zombies in the snow. It was also fun to see that some people built "caves" in them and that must be very good in case of bad weather.
We enjoyed the trip a lot since we could go both cross country skiing and down hill as well as meeting the first Swedish speaking Japanese. The landscape was beautiful, rotenburo surrounded by snow and great company made this trip special. We were happily unaware of any bad organisation since we think everything went very smoothly.
Thanks again Akira and the drivers (Lutz, Luc, Akira)