Kusatsu Onsen Daitokan

I booked myself a Ryokan for one night I had seen lots of them on YouTube and wanted to experience it for myself, seeing as I also wanted to visit this onsen town I figured I would book the main onsen Ryokan. The room itself is nice enough and similar to ones I had seen but I'll be honest, for the price I paid I was expecting slightly more. I thought dinner would be in my room not a smorgasbord style. Albeit the smorgasbord was massive with multiple meet sections, soups, broths, stews, sushi, fish cooked in every manor, fruit, bread, desert, and they even had a beer machine which poured a beer on an angle for you and then topped it off with foam. It was $16 for all you can drink in 90 mins.
I figured while doing onsens I would visit all I could in the area. There are 4 main ones and the one which was closing first I headed to, it was called Sainokawara open air onsen. It happened to be a mixed night tonight so it got quite busy and everyone had to wear the bathing suit provided. It only had one large bath for everyone and then I noticed a sauna as I was leaving but I had missed it earlier. It was nice in the open air with the snow flurries falling still but it felt a bit basic to me.
The next one I tried was Gozanoyu. This was in a really nice looking wooden building and was listed as being a very traditional bathhouse. When I got in they only had one big bath area sectioned into 4 sorta pools by beams of wood. It was really hot and you could hear the woman's side over the wall in the middle. I was expecting something more like a snow section or at least a cold pool and sauna but maybe I've become spoiled. The water itself must have been high in calcium as you could feel it and the ground was stained and slippery from the minerals.
I wasn't able to make it to the third external one but my hotel one allows me there till midnight so left that till last.
The hotel one had 2 pools, one inside and one outside. While I was using the outside one it had dropped to -5° outside so you felt the chill when getting in and out of the water, aparently will drop to -6 overnight.
One of the hotel pools had a ph of 1.6 which seemed very highly acidic but that sadly was in the partner onsen. Not sure how to get to it and I think it might only be open at night.
I did consider through the night getting another futon to sleep on but it was not that bad, better than the bed in the hostel I stayed at.
I slept in, got breakfast and then went downstairs for another onsen, they had swapped the guys and girls which was good as this one had an outside area which had snow in it so I went and put my feet in the snow to cool them after the onsen.Read more