My first visit was in 2013. We were living in Indonesia and really missing skiing so that was the driver to choose Japan. What I remember the most is that before hand I had taken such extensive notes of all the trains / busses / etc I needed to take to reach Hakuba, even writing down the Japanese characters. Anyone who has used public transportation in Japan as an English speaker would have a good chuckle about that I suppose, as it is so easy to navigate in English once you figure out how to work the ticket machines. Especially getting to Hakuba, you could just find a white guy with a ski bag and folllow him. HA. Another thing that still stands out for me, and gives me second hand cringe now (after 8 more trips to Japan) was my 5 year old child putting her feet on the seat on the Shinkansen and having them forcibly pulled off the seat by an angry train conductor. That was a big shock! We of course know better about things manners now What was great was how by the end of that last trip we were so confident in easy travel that we realized we didn't need to stress about getting somewhere early or leaving extra time between connections "just in case" because everything just works! That said, we did have one hiccup, where we were on a hop-on-hop off bus, the last trip of the day, and my wife had a few (or more) beers in here so we had to get off the bus to find a toilet, assuming that we could easily get back to our hotel via the trains. Turns out as this was not a tourist area, there were no English language maps to guide us on where we were on the train system and which station we wanted to go to to purchase to proper fare. We stood there looking confused for about 20 seconds before multiple people offered in English to help us get where we needed to be. We used this trick often over our many return trips, always finding that "confused Gaijin" are usually helped quite quickly! I can't wait to return.