Tsudome and Frosty

For our last full day, we decided to hit up the last snow festival spot, Tsudome, which is essentially a snow play area.  This morning actually turned out to be really warm which was a change. We were all a little hot when we arrived...Rowan even got to play with no hat for awhile (although the Japanese workers didn't like it).

As you can see, the ice slides never got old :)

 So many snowmen :)

Boden cuddles

They had a snow mini golf course with walls of snowmen dividing each hole, it was pretty cute

 Rowan pretending to build a snowman

 They even had some fun for the big kids. Rowan was too small to ride these, so we took turns hanging out with him at the small slides and then 2 of us went on the big tubing hill. It was really fun!

 This smaller tube they let him go on with us though!

Rowan was REALLY tired, so we decided it was time to get to the car for naps and head back to the hotel to complete the final item on our bucket list...build a snowman! We could not leave Sapporo without building a snowman.

 The snow was super powdery which was awesome, but a little bit harder to make a snowman. But, with a little work we made it happen. Rowan wanted a "2 ball" snowman, which worked out well for us.

We brought an Okinawa carrot for his nose. They are the perfect snowman nose shape!

 Banana chip eyes, carrot nose, almond mouth and M&M buttons. Frosty was perfect. We saw a couple of snowmen in various areas as we drove around (one outside Starbucks, one in a park, etc) and each time I was so happy when I saw it. So...we decided we wanted to build this guy somewhere that we would see it. The windows where we ate breakfast and dinner had a beautiful view of a huge snow area, so we decided to build him just outside one of the windows so we could watch people's reaction the next morning at breakfast. It was so fun! People were taking pictures of him from inside the hotel. Frosty spread a little joy to our fellow hotel mates.

 And to finish the trip off...my favorite snow activity...eating it! Coke snow, my favorite.

After this, we went inside, changed and headed to the onsen for some warmth and relaxing (see first Hokkaido post for details). Finally, after dinner, we walked a couple minutes down the street to see the Jozankei shrine lantern festival.

 All of these lanterns were made of snow and had a real candle in them. It was pretty incredible!

 Rowan LOVED this little green guy in a hot tub. He saw him from across the park and wanted to go say hi (which is not normal for him). I guess this one seemed unusually friendly. He was so happy to give him high 5 and say hi.

This vacation was so much fun! It was the perfect length (we weren't at all sick of the snow but it still felt good to come home). The kids both did awesome on the airplane on the flight home and then crashed as soon as we got in the car (it was about 3:30pm). Rowan transferred from here to bed without waking up and slept the entire night until 6:30am. Poor kid was SO tired. He played hard.

The next day was gorgeous so we played outside a lot and at one point Rowan came in and said, "Mom, it's warm outside!" Only 4 days away and he was surprised how warm it was, haha. Grateful for the chance we had to experience a very different part of Japan.