Winter Vacation Trip Part 4: Ikenodaira Night Out

The faculty ski trip that we went to Ikenodaira with was only a two-night trip, but since we were going to Tokyo afterward rather than back to Kanazawa on the ski-trip bus we decided to stay a third night. Scott and Sarah opted to extend their stay as well, so when there wasn't a scheduled get-together on the third night because nobody else was there, it was with them that we went out into the world seeking adventure.

One of the very few attractions in the area besides the skiing is a large business with many offerings in one building that I'm not sure what to call, besides a tourist hangout. One of the ways they drum up customer knowledge is by deploying their mascot to the local ski areas. The mascot saw us taking pictures of him (her?) from a distance and charged / waddled towards us so that we could take some pictures. This is unrelated to the rest of the story except that this is the mascot for the place we visited.

So anyway, Scott and Sarah knew about and wished to visit this tourist place in the town, so after dinner we bundled up and walked down towards town to visit it. This was during one of the regular snowstorms, so it was quite scenic out there.

This is the cool place to be, I guess.

Inside this den of wonders was a convenience store, tourist schlock store, large inside/outside onsen, karaoke rooms, bar, billiard halls, and comics library, amongst possibly other things we didn't see or forgot about. However, all this pales in importance to one simple fact: they sold preserved giant hornets for snack food.

Hard to tell in the picture, but each one is about the size of a thumb - not small.

After a pause to mentally absorb the shock of giant hornet snack food, we split up and hit the onsen (by gender naturally, these are public onsen) , then joined up again and hit the karaoke. I'm not that big a fan of karaoke - the songs are not the same and usually not as good in the versions used, plus the focus is mostly on music that isn't particularly to my taste, but hanging out was still a good time. Afterward we went back to the lodge and watched some movies until exhaustion ended the evening.

Our small picture set for this adventure can be seen here.