Day off , day trips 🤟

Even though we normally live on a rock in the middle of the Irish sea, we started to get “cabin fever” and felt the need to escape Furano. It was kind of fuelled by colleagues getting cars and talking about their adventures aswell as that groundhog day feeling.

So we synced with some others on similar days off and rented a car to join them on a trip to Kamui Ski Links. Pete loves driving so couldn’t wait for the 1hr 15 drive there on snowy roads.

Highlights of the drive were when we had to stop to let several deer cross the road 🥰

And then a random detour ( that caused Sat nav lady quite some stress ) to a Massive Buddha statue we could see from the road.

It was so refreshing being at kamui, we all just got off the gondola and tried whatever piste we came across ( we know furano like the back of our hands… ) to see what it was like. We did a few marked tree runs but the powder was fairly tracked out, so then after talking to someone in the gondola queue, we tried a small hike over to the out of bounds Back Bowl.

Man the powder there was awesome & hardly any trees. Then we cut left along an established traverse, which we’d heard we had to do before we got “too low”.

The traverse was like a pump track between trees and mostly fun, but then the uphill boot pack walk appeared.

Jesus, by the end of that we were all big sweaty puddles, especially Pete who always runs hot anyway. After 40 mins or so Janet suddenly heard a bing bong of a lift station and soon we were on a chairlift headed for lunch – phew.

After lunch we mostly stuck to groomers !!!

On the drive home, we stopped at Highlands for an onsen and sauna to soak the tired legs 😎 Japan has a nude onsen policy, so we didn’t take any pics to save you 🤢🤢🤢🤮🤮🤮🤮🙈🙈🙈