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!

Kyoto, Japan

I am so far behind on the blog that I almost decided to give it up but I know Mimi and Nana need to see pics of their grand kids that are so far away! Plus, I need a place to look back at this time of our lives and the blog is our family scrapbook so I will vow to do better once again;)
We have done a lot of traveling in the last few months so I am going to pick up when Mimi came to visit for a week during Thanksgiving. It was so fun having her in Japan. I hope we didn't wear her out with all the places we dragged her too. Its hard to experience Japan in only 10 days but we did the best we could. The girls loved having Mimi here to spoil and play with them!
 Our big trip while she was here was to Kyoto, Japan. It has been on our "must see" list and we booked a trip during the peek time of the autumn foliage. The red leaves on the Japanese Maples and the night illumination we saw were worth battling the crowds for me! The Japanese celebrate the change of seasons and the beautiful colors that go along with it and I truly enjoy that aspect of the culture. We took the bullet train there and then packed a lot of amazing Kyoto attractions into three days and it seems like we only scratched the surface.

Our bullet train got us to Kyoto in record time!  Bonus was seeing Mt Fuji from the train!

I love this picture of Mimi and the girls. This was our first outing to see colors of Autumn.
At this shrine they were so vibrant and the pictures can't do them justice!

This was at a Zen temple. The grounds were really pretty and peaceful. 

This is the Yasaka Hall on Gion Corner where the Geisha dancers perform.

This beautiful temple is Kinkaku-ji which is also known as the golden pavilion. It is covered in pure gold leaf and on sunny days its hard to look at because of how bright and shiny it is.

The girls shopping!

 Fushimi-Inari-taisha Shrine

Up the hill there are about 32,000 tori gates. Walking through it was an amazing experience! Aubrey loved counting them but I made her stop around 100 -- it was taking forever!

Night Illumination at Kiyomizu-dera 

Mimi took the girls back to the hotel for a sleepover party and Nate and I went out for a sushi date night. It was delish, best sushi we have had yet! That is our personal sushi chef we sat at the counter with.

Ninja training for the whole family!

 Arashiyama Monkey Park mountain overlooking the city

Feeding the monkeys peanuts and apples.

We took a train through the hills and mountains and then got on a boat to take it back down the river. It was gorgeous and everyone really enjoyed it! Aubrey and Reagan would get so excited when the rapids came. 

I have so many pictures but these will have to do! We loved exploring Kyoto and having Mimi with us to experience it!