As much as possible, I kept going back to the coast along pretty paths like this one. I was lucky and they didn’t usually dead-end and force me to retrace my path.

I took one look at this lovely view and immediately knew that I’d misjudged the timing of this particular trip -- if the blossoms were so perfect down here, then it was a guarantee that they wouldn’t have popped yet up in the higher elevations of Hakuba. Oh, well -- here at least the blossoms were lovely, and the weather simply could not have been better.