Take Your Onna to Work Day

I skipped a morning of work this past Thursday and Shawn took me for a ride at Snowmobile Land. When we left the apartment in the morning it was nice and clear, but by the time we arrived at the lodge it was dumping snow. The weather is always different downtown compared to the mountains nearby. It is only a short subway ride away, but is always vastly different weather conditions. What that meant however, was that there was about a foot of fresh powder for us to cut trail in.


This snowmobile tour place is pretty amazing. They have a massive fleet of some of the oldest snowmobiles I have seen, check out the photo above (the guy in the photo gives Shawn a ride to work every morning). I am not sure that machines this old are even still running in most places. Watching Shawn ride around on it in the deep snow looked more like he was riding a big noisy toboggan. They have about 90 snowmobiles in the fleet and have begun installing fenders on most of them because some of the tourists have trouble finding the brakes and use the machine in front of them to stop. The age, and abuse the fleet goes through is a real testament to the mechanic who, through some sort of wizardry, keeps all of the machines running like a charm. They all start on the first or second pull and, although they sound rough, they don't have mechanical troubles often (except when the odd tourist misses a corner and wraps the thing around a tree).

We arrived early, before the busloads arrived, said hello to the other staff who were there prepping for the day, bundled up and hit the trails. We were lucky enough to cut through fresh snow on almost all of the trails and were covered head to toe in snow the whole time. I think that Shawn had fun showing me around, and of course it was a good chance for him to not have to worry about going slowly and using hand signals to indicate slowing down and turning. He did have to help me get my snowmobile unstuck a couple of times, but it wouldn't be a day out for the two of us if he didn't have to help me out of some sort of jam.




We returned wet and happy. I put in an afternoon of work then Shawn picked me up and took me to our fave kaiten sushi place in Sapporo eki. We ate salmon and tuna until we were ready to burst and giggled at the sushi chefs who shout and grunt out orders throughout the meal.