A Day in the Life of a Kindergartner : Tour book adventures...

Friday night Alison and I had yummy mac and cheese which always seems to make the day end so much nicer. Upon my declaration that we needed to do something I searched in the tour book for something to do at night, nearby. I figured we could go see the US Forces WWII Landing Monument. Cool right? Yeah, so we drove up the road a bit where it told us to find a park that had a beach beyond it. The monument would be there...no picture of what we're looking for or anything...We make our way to the park and see the beach so we start our walk.

At the end of the beach there is this huge stingray looking animal. We'd hoped this was not the monument but figured it would be the start of a very interesting journey so of course a picture was taken! We walked back towards the park and found this huge stone with something written on it. Okay, so maybe this was the monument...THEN we walked up a few stairs and saw the real monument which we only found out when we looked it up after getting back home. Needless to say the directions in our tour book are real sketchy...which takes us to Saturday. The plan was to go see a waterfall where we would have lunch (an awesome chicken sandwich from one of our new favorite bakeries and of course CC Lemon), a really old tree, an old traditional Okinawan house, a temple, a glass factory, and finally the Pineapple Park. We were off at 10am, picked up our sandwiches and headed out to the waterfall. The drive was BEAUTIFUL though the directions a bit scary... the book said we should turn right on the given street and that we would find a small sign pointing to the direction of the waterfall. Let's just say there was no sign, at least not one that pointed anywhere, instead there was a sign that showed a fish in water being strangled by trash. Hmmm, okay, let's follow that one! lol we eventually came to a dead end and saw a couple walking back to their car. Alison walked up and pointed to the tour book and after a series of hand motions we followed their same route and found the waterfall! Alison forced me to climb the rocks, past the rope that was in place, and there we sat and enjoyed th

e wonderful noise of the water falling along with this awful buzzing noise that is either made by certain animals or in order to prevent animals from coming near, not sure which one. We made our way back to our car and headed to the ancient tree. The directions here were even better! Go south from the Nago intersection...Can i just say that Nago is the capital of our island, not a small place. Go south from the Nago intersection? Which one? Driving stressed me out, but believe it or not we did find it, though I was so excited at this point I took a picture of the tree from the side mirror. :) And so we continued to our next destination. This time we were on our way to a typical Okinawan house and the temple. These directions were a bit better. We parked and walked several blocks to these two places. Our surroundings were very "local" and we were definitely the only Americans around. After a stop at the glass factory, which proved to be disappointing (I've seen better on the island) we went to the Pineapple Park. So cool! Definitely the highlight of the day. It all began with a ride on a self operated, non-track, golf cart with a pineapple on top. The lady programmed our tour to be in English and off

we went viewing all different types of palm trees and pineapples. It let us off at the top to walk through the pineapple wine factory and tasting centers for everything pineapple you can think of...cakes, candies, cookies, juices, wines, and fresh fruit...they also had perfume and face wash (I bought some to try out for this face of mine that doesn't seem to like Okinawa weather). We browsed through some more shopping areas and headed home. All in all a good day with new adventures.

No...not this one