I was supposed to wander around Niigata today (though rain was forecasted) and then meet my friend Sho to go see Snow Peak Headquarters tomorrow. Turns out Snow Peak is closed on Wednesdays (at least the store is closed) and so we had to reschedule. TOMORROW I get to wander around Niigata, which is just as well, because it was raining pretty hard in Sanjo today (where Snowpeak is) and it’s really not that far away.

I found this all out when I was back at the coffee shop that’s in the “non-scary” direction from the train station, having a morning set for breakfast.

Then it was off to Tsubame-Sanjo. I thought it was farther away but on the Joetsu Shinkansen which goes 240 km/h (150 mph), it was 12 minutes. Not only that but I rode a double-decker Shinkansen in the green car.

After that it was off to Snow Peak Headquarters! There’s a Snow Peak store in Portland, but the headquarters were pretty interesting. You can camp there or rent a cabin or snowshoe in the winter, and the R&D is done on-site.

There are large rooms for R&D and the employees can take their laptops wherever (even on camp tables) to work. I couldn’t take any pictures of R&D, or the courtyard with sprinklers to test rain resistance, but here’s the museum (you should be able to see how big the room is). This campsite was all equipment used by customers and then donated to Snow Peak for their display.

After that we stopped at a curry restaurant in the middle of nowhere. Eight elegant counter seats and two two-tops crammed into a small area because this is Japan. We were the only two there for a while and it filled up quickly. The food was great, and a lot of the ingredients are from their garden or farms nearby.

I don’t have a picture of the giant rock we saw that looked like a mini-Halfdome, or the shrine in the woods. I think we were having too much fun being lost and trying to find things. After that Sho had to do some work so I took the long (hah) Shinkansen trip back to Niigata.

For dinner I found a taproom that looked suspiciously closed at 5pm. Turns out they weren’t supposed to be open but the guy decided to open anyway. They had a selection of Niigata beers (and a Heretic) on tap, and the hamburger was great. Good enough that I want to come back of course.

That green thing just tasted like soda. Good soda, though. The stout was pretty strong.

That was a rather tall sandwich and hard to eat, but tasty.