More fun and games at the airport

We had been told that the check in for the our 1840 flight would open at 11am today. That would work nicely cos then we could check in and our bags and be free of them for the rest of the day.

Of course that was never going to work when they were still having weather problems in Sapporo! So we decided to check our bags into left luggage and find something to do. I managed to find a Laox store in a nearby mall (only two stops on the train) so we headed there to kill a few hours. Laox is a duty free electronics place like the one we bought our cameras from in Tokyo. This one wasn't as big though. That didn't stop purchases from being made though! Bruce managed to find himself a BB firing Desert Eagle pistol to go with the BB's he got on the last visit to Tokyo. We'll see how customs goes with that in his luggage!

We killed more time buy having lunch there too but when we came back at about 3ish it was still on hold.

Sometime around 6ish they made an announcement that check-in would be commencing at 6:30. Promising stuff. The flight was rescheduled for 9pm. Of course this meant we would be getting in quite late to the airport which made me wonder about our pickups. We decided to go anyway.

The flight finally got away about 9:30, I pretty much crashed out for the duration of the 1:40 flight. When we got off the plane we could see why there had been problems; there were big piles of snow everywhere. I suppose we are lucky we got here today at all.

Then while we were waiting for our luggage, an announcement comes over the intercom that there isn't any transportation from the airport tonight (it was about midnight at this stage) and everyone will need to sleep in the airport tonight. They had set up a room upstairs with blankets etc.. Thankfully for us the Ski Japan people were still there and they still had a bus for us. TOTAL relief! I didn't fancy losing a nights sleep on the airport floor.

The bus trip to Niseko was still a 2.5 hour journey though. The bus was full too so I'm sure no-one was completely comfortable but i'm also sure we were all loving that we were on our way.

By the time we got to our room it was about 3am. Asleep by 3:30am. A long, long day.

Kudos to the Ski Japan reps for lasting the distance with us.