19th DAY: Outlook Positive

You should have seen our room. We had splayed all our stuff all over the room to dry. We had to get out of our comfy hotel by 10am so we got up at 8:30. With the amount of packing, eating, washing and of course using the computers, we were late 30 minutes to check out but luckily, they didn't care. Our day started real good. The sky looked like there possibly could be no rain, for a few hours anyways. We didn't have to go far so we hoped we wouldn't get wet. Myoko Kogen was only 35km away. This is the town that Tom and Nazomi from Niss were supposed to open their new ski school. And we were foing to help them find customers from Taiwan so we wanted to go there and check out the scene.

We started at the info center at the train station. They were real helpful. One man even knew Nazomi. He helped us find the hotels we needed to talk to and answered the 100 questions we had. Next we went to the resort and looked around a bit, took some pictures and videos but too bad, there was a big cloud hovering over the mountain peak. After that we went to the 4 hotels they suggested. 1st and 3rd were super nice and sounded like they were willing to do business. 2nd sounded like an option but we'd need a Japanese speaking person to talk to him again because he didn't speak English. 4th was more classy and more expensive so it's probably out of the question unless that's what the people are looking for. We left there feeling like this can very well be possible and this gives us more motivation to make it work.

We decided to check out Lake Nojiri. As we got there, guess what happened? Why of course, it started raining. It looked like a nice place to stop and I wanted to stay but as always there's also the pressure to keep going in case we don't give ourselves enough time to make it back to Osaka. In the end, I'm glad we stayed because it really started to come down an hour later but this time we didn't get wet, thank god!

18th DAY: Rain, Rain, Rain

There was a big lightning storm all night. We woke up with a break in the rain. We ate breakfast, packed up our stuff and tried to let the tent dry but the rain gods wouldn't have it. Luckily, they gave us a trickle before the heavy rains started coming and boy did they come. It was so hard we had to stop. We were backtracking back to Toyama so I could buy my ticket from Osaka to Naha. We eventually got there but I got my shoes soaked in the process. The cheapest flight I could find was 25000 yen ($280US). Super expensive considering I paid 16000 yen to go the opposite way. We hung out a bit more in a coffee shop because we were both dreading driving in the rain some more but we had to go even if it didn't slow and it didn't. We drove for 4 hours til we got to Joetsu not Myoko where we wanted to go another . We were wet and cold so we stayed in a hotel and lived it up for the night. It was 5000 yen each ($60) but it was dry, and comfy.