World Traveling Military Family

We really enjoy taking day trips, especially in the company of friends.  We drove extensively all over Iceland with our good friends and have drove quite a bit of Japan with friends.  In April 2006 we decided to head up to see a few sights, and Mr. B having heard that the mountain roads were now cleared and opened, decided to take us all on a 'shortcut' on the way home.  What resulted was literally a once in a lifetime experience, that we now look back and laugh at, but in the moment we were wondering what the heck we had just done.  I thought for sure after that trip our friends would never go on a day trip with us again, LOL!  Keep in mind that back home in Misawa, there hadn't been snow and during our day trip it was nice and clear, we wore coats but there was no snow.  So we make a turn onto the shortcut road, somehow I think we should've figured out something was fishy just from that....see below   

Turn to 'shortcut' notice all the sudden snow!  And how high it is?!  So we continue on and find the snow wall getting higher and higher, it was way higher than our big ole beast of a van!  And we come to this rest stop, check it out!

I'm surprised the building can hold that much snow without collapsing!  It is a rest stop but it was not open, surprise, surprise!  So we keep driving down these roads with enormous snow walls and the roads are VERY slippery, imagine that!  We have walkie talkies so we can communicate with our friends who are right behind us.  The roads were very twisty and our friend gets carsick....ugh...I felt bad.  So were making slow progress on this loooong road and we go around a curve and our Beast (our van) loses control and we are spinning and doing a 360 in the road, I jump on the walkie talkie telling our friends to slow down (they can't see us yet) because we're spinning in the road.  Thankfully there were no cars coming the other way.  The road was quite bare, as I'm sure there weren't too many people up for quite an adventurous ride.  We finally make it to our turn to Misawa and we see 2 Japanese guys parked on the side of the road so we roll down the window to make sure it's the right way to go, they promptly inform us that no we cannot go that way because further down the road is still closed!  UGH!  So we have to turn the opposite way and drive an hour back to the town we came from on a different path.  Needless to say by the time we made it off the snow roads and back to town our nerves were all shot.  We decided to stop at McDonald's and feed the kids and give ourselves a break!  On the way home from there we took the normal route, the toll road, and made it home without any issues.  Like I said today we look back and crack up about it, but at the time it wasn't so funny!  It was one of those things that was amazing to see, but I don't have the desire to ever see it again, LOL!!  

See how tall it is!!!!