Nagano

For Martin Luther King weekend we rented a cabin in the snowy mountains of Hakuba, Nagano with some of our friends. The winter Olympics of 1998 were in Hakuba. It is about a 3.5 hour drive from where we live but dramatically different landscape and temperature! It probably snowed over 20+ inches while we were there, good thing we had snow chains! Two out of the three days were a complete white-out, I have never seen so much snow in my life. It was beautiful to see and experience! The cabin we rented was lovely and had a lot of american amenities and an awesome fire to keep us warm!
We all had so much fun -- the kids played hard the entire weekend which gave the adults some off duty relax time! Here are a few pictures I took of our snowy weekend. If you want to see some really gorgeous pictures of the landscape go to my friend Christene's blog, she is an extremely talented photographer and took some amazing shots from our weekend.

This is what we woke up to the first morning. It was not this snowy when we arrived the night prior!

This is the rice field on the side of our cabin. Kids played outside the cabin for hours at a time!

That is our cabin on the right.

The kiddos had a blast on the sled! We even caught them going off the roof at one point! Although it was hard to know where the roof ended and ground started it was piled up so high! 

Even the daddy's had fun sledding outside the cabin!

One of the many beautiful cabins on our street.

The day we went to the slopes the snow was coming down like crazy!

Reagan and snow have a love-hate relationship. She goes from super happy to super mad real quick in the snow!

 

My snow bear!

One day we went to see the Snow Monkey's. It was about a 30 minute beautiful snowy hike to see them. 

Almost there!

 They have their own hot spring to keep warm!

The monkeys had a lot of spunk. Behind Reagan and I is the mountain side where they live and play during the winter months.When they get cold they head into the hot spring. It was really cool to watch them interact, they paid no attention to all the people around!

On the way home we stopped at Matsumoto Castle. One of the oldest castles in Japan. It was beautiful, the girls really enjoyed searching the inside of the castle for a princess!

Now I need to work on the Thailand post!