Hokkaido summer holidays (8 days)- part 2

Day 1 day 1 : arrive Chitose airport -> get the car (Nissan Car Rental) -> drive to Noboribetsu -> check in  Hotel Mahoroba -> buffet dinner ->wander around the onsen street ->onsen (hot-spring bath) Our flight from Taipei to Chitose was delayed for an hour. i checked online history of this flight number and found it has been delayed every single days for the past 14 days.   anyway,  we still landed safely and were ready for our holidays.  once you walked out the arrive gate, there is a information service desk on the left, we asked the information about the free wifi cause we didnt want to use our phone for data roaming. and also inquired the car rental pick up place, we were told to take lift to go to group level and we would find that "car rental service desk". Guess why i have to highlight the rental service desk? because we were surprised to see a Japanese lady sitting in the corner with a folding chair and a small flag signed with "Nissan rent a car" in her car....and not desk.....lol....this probably the cheapest "service desk" i ever seen. as payment was made when we booked the car, even it did look goody for us, we still decided to go ahead. Anyway, she confirmed our identity and made a call to someone. soon enough we got picked up by a bus. it didnt take long for us to arrive at the actually rental company,  after signing all the paper work, photo copy our documents, we went to car park and checked the condition of the car. i were over cautious at the time, cause i have had bad experience in qld when i didnt check the car carefully in the beginning and the rental company accused me damaged the rental car, lucky that was resolved after they reviewing some of past records, but did waste lots of time and unnecessary stress, so i have learnt from lessons.  By the way, we were not able to buy the Hokkaido Expressway Pass(6200yen for 6 days) , because our return location was different from the pick up location. i dont understand why this mattered, but the counter lady had quite poor English, and she cant explain to us. i did calculate our total toll charge for this entire trip, which was 11490 yen(included 3000+ yen by my bubble head friend went to the wrong way), so we could have saved my money. Also, the toll gate are all cash only, so make sure if you have local money on you if you cant get the ETC or the toll pass.  if anyone interested to know this tollway pass, here is the link: http://www.driveplaza.com/trip/drawari/hokkaido_expass/en.html we rented an English GPS, but the GPS only spoke English as turn left or right, the address enter menu was only recognize Japanese.   . the good thing is we can also put map code (which turn out to be the  phone number) of the destination.  it took us about an hour to get to Noboribetsu. once off the high way, we saw this huge demon statuette pointing to the left, which was the way to go the onsen town.  the road got foggy while we drove.  Photos were taken without filter  i was a bit worried about the parking, but the staff in front of the hotel Mahoroba were very helpful, and showed me the parking on the opposite.  (the hotel sign, that i only took the photo at night, were too busy check in during day light) view from our room, and can see our car in the car park from here.  our accommodation tonight included a dinner buffet, which served unlimited crab (three kinds of crab legs) of course, eating crab can be messy, so our hands were too dirty to use camera, unfortunately i didnt take any other photos.  we were happy with the dinner, but the most popular food wasn't the crab or steak, surprisingly everyone was queuing to get more rock-melon, which were very sweet, soft and juicy.  we were so full after dinner, so decide to walk around the town street before dipping into hot spring.  after wandering around, we went back our room to get change cloth for hot spring/onsen, and found our futon beds were made ready.  you wish......that photos were allowed in the onsen...nuh...you cant. so we couldnt get any photos of onse. but hotel Mahoroba is claimed to have the biggest outdoor onsen, so we wouldn't want to miss that out. and it was the one have the biggest onsen among all the hotels we stayed in hokkaido.  the onsen open till like 3am, but the outdoor onsen closed at 12 midnight.  we had a good bath before bed, and were looking forwards to the rest of the trip, only day 1 for now.