X-C skiing in Zao

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)

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