Now that I've finished up my posts about taking seven-year-old Anthony on his first real ski trip, I can get back to the story of our short New-Year's trip to Toyama Prefecture, a few hours' drive north of Kyoto.

My last post about the trip was the one-off “Deceptively Clear: Snow-Covered Mountains in Exquisite Detail”, but the ongoing story was in the middle of our second-day visit to picturesque Gokayama Village, where we'd left off having had some hot noodles at restaurant “Yohachi”.

To remind you, it was very snowy...

Anthony decided to pretend a snowball was a baby and he was the daddy. The snowball was named “pu-chan” (“little pu”).

We got back up to the car, brushed off a couple of inches of snow, and took the snow-white almost-deserted turnpike south for 10 slow miles to our next destination. After exiting the toll booth, I paused to snap some picture...

The actual highway we'd taken was more like the left lanes in this photo. The well-worn right lane is the exit, and I'm guessing it's got so much more traffic due to people coming from the opposite direction deciding that this is a good place to get off the highway. This exit is the first after a long 8-mile tunnel through the mountains to the south, so perhaps those heading north got a surprise they weren't expecting upon exit from the tunnel, and decided to bail.

This is also the location where I took the last two photos in my “Shutter Speed's Effect on Falling Snow” post a few weeks ago.

For completeness, here's the view from the same spot looking down the exit off-ramp, which descends sharply down the mountain to a river valley below....

The morning drive had started snowy, and now just after lunch it was much worse.... but there was more to come. Much, much more...

Continued here...