We had a very, very lazy day today. Firstly, we got out of bed at 8:00am to go down to the dining room for breakfast. It was a big breakfast like yesterday and quite well rounded with toast, fruit, cereal and eggs. After breakfast we both had a wash and bathe in the public bath in the ryokan. We have been lucky so far to not run into anyone when we've used it. Which doesn't make sense because there is a fair amount of people here and only one private shower. ...

Today we moved house from Ikebukuro to Yudanaka. Yudanaka is about three hours from Tokyo and we had to take three trains to get the there including a Shinkansen and an electric train. About half way through the journey we started to see a lot of snow and when we arrived Yudanaka was smothered in snow. We started to trek our way from the station to our ryokan, Shimaya, and as we were walking a car pulled up next to us and the man called out the window "where ar...