I awoke early again on Wednesday morning, after crashing out early the night before. I haven't really been having as much beer, whether with meals or while snowboarding, and I think it's actually causing me to have less energy. I stayed downstairs tapping away before the others came down. Breakfast was nothing special, suffice to say I'm trying, but I still can't eat cooked fish without my stomach trying to do a pyrotechnics act. That sort of set the theme for the day.
After 2.5 days of going hard out on the runs, we decided to tone it back a bit as we were all feeling the effects of hard exercise. We didn't even get suited up and out the door until after 9. By this time the ski schoolers were out in force, and while we weaved in and out of them, it made it hard avoiding a crash. We then caught the lift back up and headed over to Terakoya. This had a couple of ski schoolers, but we had a good couple of runs in the various paths with some powder before doing our favourite run. We still played around in the powder, before heading up the Gondola, but then we headed for the restaurant at the foot of Takamagahara Mammoth (the building in the webcam). We had decided to stop properly and eat morning tea as well as afternoon tea, because the last couple of days had consisted of a can of drink, which burns off really quickly. I ordered fries and beer, while Conrad went the tetotaller option of Calpis. We ended up spending about half an hour in there, before we headed out back up to Higashidate-yama for some more playing around. After a quick run with Conrad doing some shooting of Dean and me playing in the snow banks, it took us longer to get down but we still had fun. A run or two of various paths, and we found ourselves back over at Takamagahara to get some pizza and beer for lunch. (Awesome food for snowboarding)
We then headed up the quad lift at Takamagahara and over the back to another one of our favourite runs. It took us a while to do this run, as Dean went slack country too far before losing speed and getting buried under a foot of snow. This took him nearly 3 mins to get out of, because he had stacks of snow on the top of his board, and had to wade through the powder to get back to the run. Once he was out and I knew he was ok, I headed off to the Higashi gondola. From here we headed back over to Terakoya via a back run I don't think we've done before, but after we played around in the powder again, we did our run from Terakoya to the bottom of Higashi. I caught this one on camera using my goggle cam, so when I get the chance I'll upload it and stick it on youtube or something. We caught the Gondola back up, and headed towards Ichinose, but decided to do the red run, as there was still quite a lot of ski schoolers on the green run. We hammered it down, avoiding the advanced schoolers, that still don't know how to not take up the whole path, but by this time my feet stopped responding properly. We headed out the bottom, and I floated the snow bank, but I slowed down and Charlie Brown'd headfirst into the snow. It didn't hurt, but with such a silly mistake being made, I knew I was out of energy and needed to stop.
Dean and I wanted to go out for a nighta (night skiing) as our hotel does a discounted lift ticket, but after getting some ramen for an early dinner, we just didn't have the energy to get suited up and go back out. After watching some TV in the lobby for a while, we headed upstairs and started drinking brandy. Dean decided to turn in at about 8.00ish, but we didn't feel like sleeping, so we headed downstairs.
Every night the manager/owner puts out some whiskey and some Nozawana pickles, so Mum and I obliged him by joining him for a drink. We also shared some of our brandy that we brought downstairs with us, with the Russian and Dutchman joining as well. There is also a young Korean guy working at the hotel, so later on, he and the other manager joined us. What eventuated was us staying up til 1.30am with the Russian and the Dutchman singing Sam Cooke, and listening to various jazz and flamenco songs.
I don't usually stay up this late and never when I'm snowboarding, but it happened anyway. Needless to say, I was wrecked when I woke up the next morning... which was this morning.. but that's a story for another day.
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