That's Mt. Furano and a host of other peaks, 15 miles in the distance. The view from our 8^th-floor hotel room on our trip to Hokkaido was wonderful. We stayed at the New Furano Prince Hotel, which is not to be confused with the non-new one some distance away.

As I mentioned in a post the other day, I love how low-angle shots like these really compress distance, especially all the tracts of farmland in the foreground.

As for the hills, the near edge of the hills in the shot above are 4 miles away, but the dark square patch of trees in the upper-left is 11 miles away. (There's quite a bit of farming in between the two, hidden behind the hills).

In the lower-right of the first shot above, you can see a path heading away from the hotel. That's the path in the shot above, looking back on the hotel.

It's also the path that heads a short distance to the “Mori no Tokei” coffee house (森の時計 — Timepiece of the Woods), a cafe made famous by it being the main setting for the recent Japanese drama “Yasashii Jikan” (優しい時間— Tender Time). I watched the first episode just prior to this trip, and it looked interesting. Its cinematography was just wonderful. (This area, Furano City, is apparently stunningly beautiful about 50 weeks out of the year, the week we were there not being one of them.)

The cafe was nice, and not horribly expensive (a cup of coffee was 600 yen / $5), but they didn't have milk on the menu. The waitress actually tried to say no when I asked whether Anthony could have the milk we'd brought along, until I gave her a “are you some kind of a monster?” look, and after checking with the manager, she relented. Really stupid. Otherwise, the cafe was nice, and the coffee was good.

We had lunch at the Furano Wine House, which is way up on a hill and offers wonderful, panoramic views. It's 50 meters higher than the immediate surrounding area, but when you're up there it feels much higher. Here's the view toward our hotel, which is a spec on the horizon about a third of the way in from the left....

The hilltop with the wine house also has a tiny but nice little park. We ended up having lunch there two days in a row, it was so nice.

In the zoom below, the hotel is just to the right of Fumie's head, two and a half miles distant. You can't see them from this angle, but there are still-active ski runs that end right at the hotel.

The mountain behind the hotel looks quite impressive in this shot, but it's another case of the low angle compressing distance. That peak is several miles away, and I don't recall that we even noticed it while at the hotel. (The mountains directly behind the hotel are much shorter, although as I noted, they do sport some of the only ski runs in the area.) Perhaps it was just that our view from the window, the other direction across the valley to the taller mountains, held our attention.

The mountain in the view above is “Mt. Furano West” (富良野西岳 — furanonishidake), and at only 1,331 meters, is almost a kilometer shorter than those across the valley.

For completeness, here's the reverse angle of the hill with the wine house, from our hotel window. The park and the wine house are at the top of the hill with the barren triangle shape, just right of center.

The hotel itself was nice, and the few times we called down for something someone arrived seemingly before we even pulled our hand away from the phone. My one gripe is that they didn't have room service. I generally consider room service to be a huge extravagance, but it can sure be a blessing when returning after a long day, when Anthony is tired and fussy, and Mommy and Daddy are, well, tired and fussy.

Rather than room service, the lobby had a convenience store, and each room had an empty fridge. Our lunches on this trip were great, but dinners mostly consisted of convenience-store junk. Still, it was a thousand times better than the last hotel I wrote about.