Every morning at Jared and Emma’s bus stop, I had been noticing a few ladies stay back and chat after the kids are off to school.  One day I thought to myself ” hey self, you should stay behind too a minute and introduce yourself, and try to make some friends.”  So I did and it has really been a lot of fun!  Sometimes it’s only a few minutes, but there have been times when over an hour has passed and we’re still out there chatting away.  It’s usually not long before Evan starts whining to go HOME!!  Yesterday at the bus stop they invited me to go to breakfast with them, off post at this little Italian restaurant down the street.  Yes I know I live in Japan….But anyway, that’s what I did this morning and it was so much fun!!  There are some talkers in the group, so I didn’t have to say too much, which was actually kind of nice :)  Oh, and none of these ladies are members of the church, which is not really something I do.  Not like I have anything against non-members,  but that’s just usually where I find about 99% of my friends.  Since we haven’t had a van, and hence haven’t been able to go to church I haven’t really been able to connect with any one yet.  At least anyone that lives in my neighborhood.  I only bring that up because these ladies are all huge coffee addicts!  Hey, I’m not judging here!  Also, at the restaurant, they offer free coffee and tea with your meals, and I was having a heck of a time understanding the waitress when she was asking me if I wanted either of those drinks.  I was good with my water!  They actually made fun of me a little too!  But it’s cool, I can take it :)  Oh, and as a side note, the food was SO GOOD!   Those Japanese can make some killer french toast and scones!  I’ve decided that that’s where Tyler and I will go on a date in a couple of weeks!  He doesn’t know that yet. 

So it was fun and I’ve realized that I’ll be alright, and my 5 years in Clarksville and Tyler being deployed have helped me become less shy more open to just throw myself out there to make new friends.  But dang it I miss my Fort Campbell friends!  But you know y’all are welcome to come visit :)

Phew, so many posts!  But I’m sure this is the one that you’ve all been waiting for *coughheidicough*  We did finally make it to Okinawa on December 6th, a day late and many dollars short!  Hawaii is expensive ya know.  So it’s winter time, right?  I would say it was probably around 70 degrees or so out here.  Beautiful!  We keep hearing about how we’ll acclimate and next winter we’ll be like everyone else bundled up when the temps reach 60!  I do wish I had some pictures of the locals out here with their parkas on :)

But anyway, the TLF was really nice (much better than Turner on Fort Campbell!)  We had two adjoining rooms, a full size table and kitchen, and two full bathrooms.  Like I mentioned in my last post, there are no elevators, so that was really stinky.  Plus, no internet hook ups in the rooms.  Oh well, we survived.  Well, I just barely survived only getting to go to the library maybe once a day to check my facebook.  Here are pictures of us in our first few days on the island!

After Tyler got his driver’s license we rented a van so we could do a little sight seeing.  He took us to Torii Beach,  it’s on Torii Station, one of only 2 Army posts on the entire island.  The sand was a bit rocky, but we had a BLAST messing around in the sand and ocean!  Too bad we weren’t just a bit more prepared with shorts/t-shirts.  We still had a great time though! 

After we were done at the beach we headed over to a store called Jusco.  I’ve heard people describe it as a “Japanese Wal Mart”  Oh no, it’s way cooler than that!  It’s actually like a huge mall, except without the separate stores.  There are food courts and a huge arcade.  They are several floors, they sell clothes, appliances, some furniture, all sorts of stuff.  There is a HUGE pink wall dedicated to Hello Kitty.  Now that was scary.  Next time I’ll take pictures.  I was so overwhelmed that day.  It was right before Christmas on a Saturday and the place was packed!  We picked lunch up at one of the stands.  We ordered a few chicken skewer type of things, and some other fried potato things.  I’m actually not 100% sure what I ate, but it was good!  That was pretty much the last time we were able to explore together.  We bought a van, but it has been giving us trouble and is in the shop right now.  Bummer!!!!  Tyler has a great little black car, but we don’t all fit in, so it’s been impossible for us to go out all together!  My next post I’ll catch you all up on our new house and Christmas :)

I do have to start this post with what happened to us AFTER getting the van in storage!  It was only around 4pm, so we decided to use this gift card Jenny gave us (thanks Jenny!!!) for Chili’s, Macaroni Grill, and a couple other restaurants.    We figured it would be our last chance.  So we break out our trusty GPS Susan, and get to looking up Chili’s.  We find one and head that way.  And we “reach our destination” and there is no Chili’s in sight.  Anywhere.  We drive around the shopping center a bit and decide that there is NO Chili’s.  So, we look up the second one on the list and head there.  By the way, all of this going back and forth took us past the Seattle Temple several times, so there wasn’t too much complaining!  We get to the second Chili’s and that one is no where to be found either.  What the?  So there are zero Chili’s in Seattle?  And yet we’re being told there are…So we decide, hey Macaroni Grill!  We find that, right smack dab in the middle of down town!  Um, yeah, there’s no way we’re going to find parking and make our way there.  Sigh….so we decide to eat at the hotel restaurant (yum) and call it good.  This all took us probably 3 hours by the way, so no time to do anything fun like I hoped we could.  You know, like see the Space Needle or something!  So anyway, it turns out that Chili’s and the Macaroni Grill are the ONLY full fledged American restaurants on the island :)  We were able to use it, thanks again Dahlke family!

Ok, now on to the fun part!  Van is in storage, bags are repacked (for the 30th time) passports and itinerary are in hand.  Now to wake up at 4am to make it to the airport and turn our car in, do all of the junk needed to get on a plane and wait for our 8:30am flight to Honolulu, HI.  Once there we needed to jump on a connection to Osaka, Japan.  Then onto Naha, Okinawa, Japan.  This is what we looked like while sitting and waiting for our flight…..

As we’re sitting there we see the departure time start to get later and later….Aw crap!  We already had only maybe an hour in between flights anyway, what the heck!  Tyler talks to the lady and she says “Well, if we make it there for your flight, you could get on but your luggage wouldn’t make it.  OR you could wait for the next flight, and have your luggage.  Of course North West airlines will put you up in a hotel in Honolulu, and give you taxi and meal vouchers.”  Hmm, what to do what to do….As it turns out our next flight was long gone anyway by the time we got there.  SCORE!  The airline people were waiting right there at the gate when we got off and took us to get our vouchers for taxis, hotel, dinner and breakfast.  There is only 1 flight a day heading to Osaka, so we had to spend the entire day suffering in Hawaii :)

We got to our hotel around 3pm or so.  The Ala Moana, I highly recommend it!  It was beautiful there!  We could tell a storm was coming, but we decided to take a walk to the beach, I mean, we’re in Hawaii, right?

Then it started raining.  A lot.  We ran as fast as a four year old leg’s can go back to the hotel!  After changing we headed down to the Japanese restaurant to eat our “free” meal.  Turns out they don’t really give you enough to cover an entire meal…but it helped!

The next morning we woke up to this….

Then, we re-packed (for the 31st time!) ate breakfast and headed on down to the air port.  That all went smoothly.  We scanned our passports (ah, it’s really happening!)  and settled in for a nice 10 hour flight.  I didn’t take any pictures.  We were pretty much the only white people on the plane, AND there were maybe about 2 other kids.  So I didn’t want to look like a weirdo.  It actually was a great flight, everyone had their own TV on the back of the chair, you could play games or watch movies.  For FREE!  So that’s all we did the whole time, so it went super fast!  Osaka was very interesting!  Obviously every sign was in Japanese, so we just kind of followed the crowd until we came upon a line that said “foreigners” Well, that’s us!  We had to unload our jillion bags, and go through customs.  Poor poor Logan!  He volunteered to push one of the carts, and on his way out of the zig zag customs line all the bags fell and he made quite a little traffic jam :)  But everyone there is so nice, it was no problem!  FINALLY we ask around and make our way to the ticket counter to get our bags checked (again!) and we could take a deep breath and wait for our final plane ride to Okinawa!

I have no pictures of that either.  By this point we are dead on our feet!  We left Hawaii at around 10am on Friday, flew for about 12 hours total, and made it to Okinawa at 11pm on Saturday!  We lost a whole day, kinda sad!  We were able to meet up with some lovely ladies from church, got to the TLF, lugged our jillion bags up 3 flights of stairs  (technically I didn’t do the lugging, Tyler and our new friends did!  Thanks!).  Who doesn’t put elevators in a hotel?  Who?  And actually jet lag wasn’t too big a problem.  Since it was already pretty late, it was bed time anyway, the kids woke up the next morning at a normal time!  Sweet!  Next post I’ll put up Japan pictures (sorry Heidi, be patient please!)  This post is long enough!

Once we left Idaho we made our way even further west to Vancouver, WA to stay the night with Tyler’s brother, Stuart, and his family.  On the drive out there we’re flipping through our info on the VPC where we’re going to be storing the van.  Tyler suggests we give them a call just to check in and make sure we’ve got what we need.  Wow, good thing we did!  They tell us we need some form that gives us specific permission to store a vehicle.  Um…..why did no one at Fort Campbell tell us we needed that?  We can’t call back to KY because the office is closed for the day.  WHAT THE HECK MAN!  So I’m panicking, like always, and we decide if worst comes to worst, we can give it to Stuart and Arlee!  Thankfully the  next day we were able to call Post and get what we needed faxed over.  Besides, it would have been a huge headache to try and let Stuart have our car.  Insurance agents are very picky!  Sorry guys, we love you, but no car for you!  Anyway, let’s get back on track here.  We met Stu at  Red Robin :)  We had to get in as much bottomless Steak Fries as humanly possible!

We just headed back to their place and relaxed the rest of the evening.  The next morning we head out to Boring, OR to visit with Tyler’s Grandma and Grandpa Hardy.  Tyler hasn’t seen them in many years, and they’ve never met Evan, so it was such a wonderful trip!  His Grandma had a terrific day planned!  We ate lunch at the house, then they took us to town to see A Christmas Carol.  Jim Carey’s version, it was really cool!!  A little scary for the younger ones (Emma) but very well done.  We came back to the house for dinner with them and Stuart’s family.  Man, we just couldn’t get away from them ;)

We decided to follow Stu and Arlee on the way back to their place.  They take us out to the boonies and then turn into this little parking lot a some weird diner.  Oh boy, little did I know yet what that weird diner really was!  It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Twilight, and so is Arlee.  We ended up making a stop at the Carver Cafe, the diner they filmed a few scenes at!  So dang cool!  They took us to another stop where a lot of outdoor forest scenes were filmed.  It was dark so not very many pictures came out, but it was really neat to stop there and see a few spots!

So after that taste of Hollywood, we got back to the apartment and Stuart starts going on and on about these delicious cookies or something Arlee makes (I’m wracking my brain and I can’t remember what it was that sent Stu and Tyler on a midnight mission to the store for ingredients!)  I remember the were so very good and we had a great time eating, drinking eggnog and staying up extremely late!  The next morning we were off to Seattle to get our van taken care of and check into our hotel near the airport!

Alright, I’m back with another post in my long string of posts leading up to…..I guess the present day :)  I’m not feeling very witty or creative lately.  As far as writing blogs go I suppose.  I really want to catch you all up on everything though, so here it goes!

We left Colorado the day before Thanksgiving to give us plenty of time to make it to Burley, Idaho to be with Tyler’s mom for the holiday.  The drive was super easy, thank goodness the weather cooperated with us.  All I can say about that is this…..I’m so grateful that at the last minute I decided to keep our winter jackets instead of packing them away.  It was so dang cold out there!  So anyway, Guylia reserved the church building to hold all of the people that would be joining us for Thanksgiving.  We were able to visit with Tyler’s grandpa, his Aunt Janet’s family, his younger brother, all sorts of fun people!  The day after we were able to spend time with his Dad’s side of the family in Rupert.  We hung out, ate tons of leftovers (mostly desserts!) and then took a little trip out to the middle of no where to go shooting.  Apparently that’s very popular out there!  Heather and Tiffany, Tyler’s cousins, own TONS of guns.  And we had a “blast” out there :)

After freezing our rear ends’ off out there, we decided we  just weren’t cold enough, so we ran back into town to meet up with Tyler’s mom and her husband to go see the Square lighting.  Seriously, talk about small town!  Santa comes in on a fire truck and there’s chili and hot chocolate.  Good times, and the kids loved it!  We didn’t have any that cried when the fire works went off!

Saturday we took a tour of the Post Office in Rupert.  Tyler’s mom is a Postal Worker so she gave us the inside scoop on how mail gets sorted and ends up where it belongs.  The kids got a huge kick out of that and seeing her mail truck too!  I didn’t get any pictures of that though, so just use your imagination!  We took a trip up to Firth, ID to visit with one of Tyler’s cousins, Amber.  Well, Amber’s husband, Loren, is actually Tyler’s cousin, but whatever!  We were all at Fort Gordon together a few years back and we haven’t seen them in too long!  No pictures there either, but we had a great time!  THEN….we headed up to Idaho Falls to grab dinner and catch a performance of The Forgotten Carols.  I highly recommend seeing that if you ever have a chance, and bring lots of tissues!

And that does it for Idaho!  Monday morning we left for Washington!  Alas, that is for the next post!

We were very fortunate that we were able to swing flying out of Seattle to make it over to Okinawa.  We chose Seattle because they have a VPC (vehicle processing center) and it would take us straight up through Colorado, Idaho, Oregon and Washington.  Conveniently enough where our families live :)  It took us a good 2 days’ drive to get to Colorado, but holy cow, when we first laid eyes on those Rocky Mountains…..ahhhh!

Tyler hadn’t been back at all since he left for Basic Training back in April ’04.  We stayed with Tyler’s sister, Candice.  It was a great time!  I don’t think I’ve ever played so much Rock Band in my life!  Of course we HAD to hit up our favorite restaurant,  Red Robin!

My Mom had us over, and we spent some time with my side of the family, so we were able to see everyone we wanted too.  Well, family-wise anyway, we missed our friends though!  We only stayed 2 full days, we decided to spend Thanksgiving up in Idaho with Tyler’s Mom!  I’ll save that for the next post however…..I’m in the middle of making a Boston Cream Pie, so I gots to go ;)