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.