Just another day...: End of Summer

At the end of summer, we went to Okinawa for our last family trip before Maggie heads off to her new life in college. It is known as Japan's Hawaii and it is only a couple hours away on a direct flight. We rented a car, skirted the city and drove up the toll road to Ocean Expo Park (part of the International Ocean Exposition in 1975), and home to the Churaumi Aquarium, famous for their three whale sharks. These awesome creatures are up to 12 meters/40 feet long - you can imagine how big the tank must be!

We made it just in time to take photos of the sunset before checking into Hotel Mahaina Wellness Resort. We had a lovely view of the ocean from our Western/Japanese (two bed, two futon) room. Enjoyed the onsen and pool and a couple delicious meals in the resort - of local pork, beef, seafood, and mugs of the local brew Orion. The Expo park is quite large so we only walked around the northern part where the aquarium and beach were. We drove around the rest of the peninsula after and stopped in Nago for ramen and a little shopping at Aeon Max Value.

There's still a big U.S. military presence there and we saw a number of them on Friday evening out to dinner with their family and friends. During one of our many stops for local ice cream, Blue Seal, we noticed the logo looked like the Foremost brand logo - a favorite of Paul's from his early days in Taiwan. On another ice cream stop, we were enlightened when we found the history of the name posted.

After a couple nights up north, we drove back south along the coast to the airport city of Naha, stopping for local beef burgers near the big base, Kadena, returned our rental car and rode the monorail into the city for our last couple nights. We went for a stroll along the touristy shopping street, Kokusai-dori and ate more local meat and seafood upstairs in the market with takeout sashimi from below. The next day we set out for Shuri Castle and since it's on a hilltop had to wait out a thunderstorm before walking around the grounds. We returned to our hotel for a break before venturing out for a shabu-shabu dinner at a restaurant built to resemble a treehouse.