What an adventure

Well, here's my first attempt at the blog. I've been meaning to do this ever since we arrived on the island, but you know how daily life gets in the way and before you know it it's time to go to bed and start all over.

Okinawa is beautiful, frightening and definitely an adventure. I'm finally getting used to driving on the left side of the street, in the right side of the car and having the turn signal on the wrong side of the steering wheel. Yikes. I can't tell you how many times I've turned the windshield wipers on when I wanted to turn left. I can honestly say that I've only tried to drive on the right side of the street a couple of times and that was while I was on base. Thankfully, there weren't any other cars on the road at the same time.

We decided to go on a little adventure with one of our friends to visit the island of Sesoko (northwest of here and attached by a bridge). Getting to the island was easy. Finding the beach was another story. You would think we would just drive until we ran into the ocean, right? Wrong. The road ran out...well it turned into a very narrow dirt road and driving a big station wagon, I was daunted. We finally found it (the long and difficult route) and we just wanted to hop into the water. Nope, not gonna happen. After some miming with the locals and narrowly escaping scraping the side of the car on a metal sign we found the parking lot ($15 to park), rode a van to the beach and found out that we couldn't get in the water there, but had to walk to a roped in area. It was a long walk with a squirmy baby and all the necessary beachy items. They had lounge chairs and umbrellas set up. I wanted an umbrella for the shade and was willing to pay whatever it cost (another $15). So yes, it was an expensive adventure to the beach, but the water was crystal clear and felt wonderful. Would we do it again? Probably not, but now we can say we did it.