New Year In Yuzawa

We headed off to the mountains for New Years, Ebi-kun has only ever seen a smattering of snow, so we thought it would be fun to see the real thing. We took a shinkansen to Yuzawa, it is only an hour away so now I am wondering why we have never done this before. We hired a kids set for Ebi-kun, which meant he got snow wear, hats, gloves, boots and a sledge. The first day we stayed at GALA resort which is where we had hired the kit from. They had an area sectioned off for the kids to do sledging and another bit for kids learning to ski. The weather was beautiful, sunny, clear and actually quite warm.

We sledged...

and crashed, the slope was quite fast and there were big cushions at the bottom, kids were flying out of their sledges, left, right and centre!

There was also a lot of snowman and igloo making going on (we didn't build this!)

and the mountains were beautiful

New years eve we went to GALA to pick up the set but decided to try a different resort, NASPA, this time we didn't need to pay for the gondola but we did have to pay to go in the kids area, it was much better than the GALA one though. We also discovered that we could have a helmet with the kids kit, Ebi-kun was loving wearing the helmet, he looked so cute! The kids area had a stand on lift to take you to the top of the slope and they also had a variety of sledges, I think we tried them all out, they had put up gates for you to go through, but to be honest most people were wiping the gates out - us included.
We made a snowman, had a massive snowball fight and laughed so hard. The weather started off OK but as the day wore on it got worse and worse. We had a late lunch the played for a bit longer then headed back around 4pm.

The final day we did the same thing, just as well since the gondola at GALA was closed since the weather had only got worse, there had been 70cm of snow over night and the whole place looked different. Ebi-kun was amazed by it all. I couldn't take many pictures the last day due to the mad snow, I was trying to get the snowflakes on his eye lashes here, didn't quite work but I like the shot anyway.

I think this picture just about sums up the time we had there, if only you could hear the squeals of delight that went with it!

I think we all agree that it was the best new year we have had for years, the last memorable one was probably doing the conga as a newly wed on the beach in Cambodia!

If you want to see all the photos, they are over here.

So, what did you get up to over the new year?