On Saturday night Mark and I set out to a small party at our friends' house, and I offered to bring a lemon tart. Friday night I started gathering the ingredients and realized that I didn't have enough all purpose flour. Of course I noticed this after I came home from my bi-weekly trip to the commissary (the …
Continue reading More Adventures in Baking, the Lemon Tart Edition
On weekend mornings, Mark ventures out on long walks with our pup Ruby. Recently he discovered a huge cemetery about 20 minutes away and invited me to join him and Ruby. Because who doesn't love to visit cemeteries! I have always found cemeteries fascinating. As a child we lived in the outer suburbs of Chicago, …
Continue reading A Morning Stroll in the Neighborhood Cemetery
You Americans out there think you recycle your trash; I assure you that you do not. The Japanese Seriously, No Kidding RECYCLE. Take the disposal of cooking oil after deep frying. In the U.S. I would save an empty glass jar or plastic bottle and pour the oil into that, then throw it in the regular …
School and work resumed this week but fond memories of last week’s ski trip live on; I’ll post a few final thoughts from our ski trip over the coming days. Our hotel included a traditional onsen, or public bath. Plenty of ski accommodations around the world include hot tubs for soaking tired bodies after a …
Continue reading Visiting the Onsen, or The Best Apres-Ski Ever
In the late 1990s I spent five months in Sasebo, Japan when I was forward-deployed with the U.S. Navy. I was an officer in charge of an LCAC (hovercraft) detachment, and my fellow officer in charge spent several years in Japan on a previous tour. He was a great resource for important tips about visiting …
This morning we awoke to flurries. The gorgeous, crisp mountains that we saw for the last two days disappeared behind a wall of grey. That could only mean one thing: snow! We ate a quick breakfast and headed back to the same resort as yesterday, Happo. Tessa asked to go to ski school, so we …
Four resorts offer skiing in the Hakuba valley; today we tried the largest and most famous, called Happoone (pronounced ha po oh neh) or Happo for short. Happo hosted the alpine events at the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics, so we scoped out the trail map beforehand and got excited. Then we arrived and saw …
Continue reading Day 1: Happoone, or Whitetail with an Alpine View
Well, a view of it from our hotel room, anyway. There's a whole lot of brown here, though a dusting of snow fell last night. Last night we heard that there's plenty of snow at higher elevations. Off we go to find out for ourselves!
On the road! We left this morning for our ski trip to Hakuba. Two hours in we felt peckish and stopped for a bite at a favorite spot: the highway rest stop. The typical American rest stop includes fast food, bad coffee, doughnuts, dodgy souvenirs, and maybe one mediocre sit-down restaurant like Denny's or …
It's go time. Tomorrow, we hit the road not-very-early and head for Hakuba, a ski village about four hours drive away. Hakuba lies in the greater Nagano area, site of the 1998 Winter Olympics. On Wednesday we will ski at Happo-One, a resort that hosted several events at those winter games. Fun fact: it's pronounced Ha-po-oh-nay, …
