nozawa sun and no snow

Well the weather continued to be fine, but the snow sucked and the gondola lifts were closed due to strong winds. I braved the lines for 45 minutes to get one slushy, crappy run in before calling it a day.
Most folks came back from karaoke between 1 and 4 in the morning, so they weren't really into the concept of hitting the mountain anyway.
We packed up our stuff, sent gear to Niseko in Hokkaido, and went into town. Took the Sketchy Chairlift down into town and hit the onsen before grabbing the bus back to Nagano station. Very cool town; steep narrow streets with old, local onsen all over the place. Hana-chan tried one of the little local onsen, and we headed up to one of the bigger ones near a hotel.
Made it back down to the bus stop and by 1:30 everyone made it on the bus -- no one bothered to stay the whole day.
Back at Nagano we knew we couldn't change our tickets so we just took over a non-reserved car on an earlier train, made nasty faces whenever anyone tried to sit near us, and we were back in Tokyo by 5pm.