Week 1 +

The first week on island has been a whirlwind of events, with long periods of boring mixed in.  We arrived on Friday night and were settled into our hotel around 10PM.  We all did pretty well with the time change and slept most of the night, I think we were all up by 5 AM though.  Brock took longer to adjust than the rest of us, but overall, it wasn't a hard change.  

Saturday morning our sponsor picked us up and we headed to the exchange to get cell phones.  There are 2 companies on the island that we could pick from, but they are both expensive with crappy service, so there wasn't much of a choice really.   

We also hit the Commissary for some supplies to have at the hotel because as luck would have it, a Typhoon was headed our way.  It's a good thing we did get the groceries, because we spent Sunday at the hotel and Monday the base was officially closed.  It didn't seem all that bad from the hotel window, but what do I know about typhoons...

On Tuesday we had a housing meeting.  They assign base housing based on rank and occupancy rates, Brandon's rank dictated that we live on base, which was fine with us.  Wednesday when we were taking our driving test at the Newcomers Orientation meeting, we got the call from housing that they had 2 units for us to check out.   PS, we passed the test, here's a picture of us with our new licenses. 

We were officially offered 2 places, one a multi-unit and one single family home.  We were able to go into the multi-unit, but not the single family home.  We had 24 hours to make our decision, although they were willing to give us a little more time because we couldn't see the inside of the house.  

Here's a picture of the multi-family unit.  It had just been renovated, and honestly, it was much nicer than I was expecting.  The yard, or lack of yard, was the main negative for us. 

This is the new kitchen in the multi family unit... it was hard to say no to.

We decided to go with the Single family house even without seeing the inside.  We did drive by and peek in the windows a few different times and it looked ok.  We decided to go with this house because the yard was pretty nice.  I should also mention that we offered to get Reagan a trampoline if we ever had a yard that would work for one, so this nice, flat backyard sealed the deal.  We are now the proud new owners of a trampoline :).  

 Our  house on Kadena

The perfect backyard for a trampoline

Our first pet - one of two huge snails we saw stuck to our house.

The other highlight of the first week and a half is that we purchased cars.   The plan coming over here was that I would get a minivan... I know, I know, and that Brandon would get a small car.  Well, it didn't quite work out that way.  We went to a few of the dealers here to get the first car, but we just weren't seeing a minivan that I wanted.  I wanted a small, Japanese style one, but I soon realized that most of those only seat 5 people, which defeated the purpose of a van for me.  So, we ended up with a Honda Odyssey for Brandon.  It's not like an Odyssey from home though, it's more like a cross over or station wagon.  It will hopefully last us the 3 years we are here.  

We decided to try to get the other car from a service member that was leaving the island.  We hit the lemon lot on Kadena and saw the cutest little red car.  It's a Honda Fun Cargo and it's now mine.  It is tiny enough that driving and parking in town will be easy for me, but yet has some grocery room in the back.  It's bare-bones though...  It's probably too early to start day dreaming about the car I will get when we move home, right?  

So, Friday is the big move-in day and we are so ready to get out of this hotel.  It's nice enough, but we are cramped for space and I'm sick of eating out.  

All in all, the first week went well.  We are happy to be moving in as quickly as we are and the driving hasn't been as intimidating as I expected.  

We've made it to Okinawa!

We've made it!  Today is the start of our second day on the island and we are hunkered down in our hotel due to a threatening Typhoon that is supposed to hit later today into tonight.  So far it doesn't look that scary outside and the winds do not seem to be too bad, but we'll see.

To catch up, we spent the summer in Iowa visiting family and friends.  The time there went really fast and while we were sad to leave, it felt like it was time to get on with this move.  

We were able to change our airline tickets so that we could fly to Seattle to catch the Patriot Express from our local airport in Iowa instead of flying back to South Carolina where the military automatically booked us from.  I think it cost about $80/ticket for the kids and I.   

Our flight from Iowa left at 12:50 pm on Wed.  We had to fly to Chicago and then from there to Seattle.  

Here's a picture of us in Iowa with our luggage before the first flight.  We ended up with 8 checked bags.  I would NOT normally want to take this much stuff, but because the kids and I spent those 2 months in Iowa, we had a lot of stuff with us. 

We got to Seattle around 5 PM and our flight on the Patriot express wasn't until 8:30 AM the next day. We had read reports online that people got in line early to get seats together for the flight to Okinawa, so we decided to just hang out at the airport instead of getting a hotel.  This decision turned out fine for us and we would do it again.  At most we would have only been able to use the hotel from 5 until about midnight that night.  

We started out by getting our luggage in Seattle, and then heading to the USO.  They had a separate luggage annex to park our carts in and were very accommodating.   We decided to drop off bags off and get dinner at one of the restaurants downstairs.  After dinner, we headed back up to the USO, but it had gotten much busier since we had dropped our bags off.  There was no longer any place to sit, and we decided that we would rather just take our bags back downstairs and find a place to sit and wait where we could watch the AMC line to see when people were lining up.

For us, this was a good decision.  We found some seats and just hung out and tried to nap.  Around 11, people started lining up in the AMC queue area.  We waited until around midnight and then moved our stuff into line.  Brandon stayed with the stuff while the kids and I hung out on the chairs.

Around 1:30 or so, a representative from AMC came out and separated the families into a different line from the single people flying over.   We were the first group in the family line.  We waited in this line until 2:30 when they opened the ticketing area.  We were quickly processed through ticketing.  We had to load all of our checked bags onto the scale at one time, then all of our carry ons and finally, they asked us for our body weights.  

After we had our tickets, we proceeded through security.  They only had one screening area open, which was screening 3.  I think some of the other people got in line at security screening 2, which was the closest one to the ticketing area, but that area didn't open up until 4 AM.  

Here's  a shot of the AMC queue area around midnight.

Once we found our gate, we just camped out there until the flight left at 8:30.   The first leg of the flight was 10.5 hours.  We were tired from staying up most of the night, so we slept a good majority of the flight.  We did get 2 meals and 2 snacks, plus lots of drinks during the flight.  They also gave out free head sets and played 5 movies on the way over.

This flight stopped at 2 bases in Japan to unload/load people and each time we had to get off the plane and wait for about 2.5 hours each time.  

We finally arrived in Okinawa around 8 PM on Friday night.  It was dark and raining when we landed, so we boarded a bus to take us from the flight line to the terminal.  We were lucky enough to have our sponsor pick us up, so he drove us to the Westpac lodge on Camp Foster.  

Overall, the flight wasn't as bad as I thought it would be with an 8 year old and a 6 month old.   The kids did really well, so that made the trip much easier for us.  

Our first real day in Okinawa was spent getting cell phones and hitting the commissary.  Here's a picture of Reagan in front of a Japanese vending machine.