Hakuba

William and I took an MWR three day trip to Hakuba Happo-One ski area last weekend.  It's one of those trips where you get on the bus at 2:00 AM and then try to catch up on your sleep during the 5 1/2 hour bus ride up to the ski area.  It's a painful way to start a ski trip, but when you get there, you get three days of skiing and two nights in the hotel.

William and I in the Atom Gondola.  Hakuba Happo-One was one of the ski areas used to host the 1998 Winter Olympics.  It is a world class ski area with lots of terrain to ski.  William loves to explore, so we covered quite a bit of the mountain.  I was always pretty darn tired at the end of the day.

William keeps an eye on the chair numbers to see how many there are and is always on the hunt to sit on a cool number.  We had gotten 100 and 7 and he said he needed a number 1 to complete the trip.  I pointed out that the chances of that are kinda slim, so don't despair if you don't get it.  And then a couple runs later...

Then, a few more runs later...

 The kid is lucky, I tell you.

We'd eat lunch at the top of the mountain (at least the highest place open at the time).  It has a nice cafe' with American fare.  Here, William is eating a dish of onion rings and chips.  Sounds like two sides to me, but he really wanted it.

Below is a video of our trip.  We have a Hero camera which is a water and shock proof video camera that can be mounted to things.  I attached mounts to William's and my helmets and my ski.  The ski mount eventually fell off and was lost, but luckily not while the camera was on it.  Got some cool footage while it was there though.  We also caught a few crashes which you can see at the end.