Traveling

Sunday September 19, 2010

We have been in Okinawa, Japan for 2 days now; things are quite different and interesting to get used to.  I’ll go back a few days to start at the beginning…

Sunday September 12: After spending 26 wonderful days at home with my family, I left Greensboro at 9:22 in the morning.  It was a pretty sad day for everyone, and as I was hugging my mom one last time and trying to hold back the tears (and not succeeding), she said to me “it’s going to be okay.”  I kept repeating that phrase over and over again when I started to feel sad.

I arrived in Ohio at 1 that afternoon, and visited with Brian’s family for the next few days.  I would probably have to say that my favorite part of the visit was taking walks with his family on a trail through part of their town.  It was very peaceful and reminded me of home.

Wednesday September 15:  (HAPPY 25 BIRTHDAY BRIAN!!!)

Our first flight on our long trip started in Dayton, Ohio.  Once we got to the airport, we went to check in.  As things usually go with Brian and me, there was one rather large glitch…the lady only saw our flight going from Dayton to Seattle.  She couldn’t see in the system where there was a plane to take us to Okinawa.  Brian was confident that he could figure things out once we got to Seattle, so there we left, flying by the seat of our pants! 

After saying bye to his mom, we headed for our gate, and our plane left at about 8:45 in the morning.  This was just a short flight over to Chicago, Illinois.  Once we got to Chicago, we had to ride a shuttle bus over to our next terminal.  While on the shuttle, a Navy Officer sat down beside us, turns out he had done a tour in Okinawa and visited for work quite often.  It’s a small world, right?!  He talked to us for a while about Okinawa, things we should do and look out for as well as some of the basic language.

Just as soon as we got to our next gate, our plane started boarding, we barely had time to run to the bathroom and grab a bite to eat!  This was a much larger plane than I had ever been on before.  It seated 3 people on each side of the plane.  I was seated on the very last row, and thankfully in the aisle seat.  Brian and I weren’t assigned seats together, but it was okay for that flight.

We got to Seattle at 12:30 that afternoon (3:30 our hometown time) and were quite overwhelmed with the enormity of the airport.  We grabbed our luggage and were scrambling to find someone to help us figure out our plane tickets.  Brian went to talk to a lady to ask questions and we found out from her that we would be on a military flight and those don’t leave until the middle of the night, and in fact we wouldn’t even check in with the flight until 10 that night!!  Finding out this news meant that we would have a 16 hour layover in Seattle.  After talking things over with each other, we decided (though we were very tired) that we should take advantage of the fact that we were in Seattle, Washington and try to do a little sight-seeing. 

We found the USO in the airport who could store our luggage for free until our plane left.  This was a really nice area for active duty military and their families.  There was a room for luggage to be stored, an area with tables for eating, a couple computers, couches, a bunk room, a kid/baby room, bathrooms and a shower.  After tagging our luggage and leaving it in the room, we left the airport to see what Seattle was all about.

Finding the metro was challenge enough for us that day, after 30 minutes of searching and help from a couple friendly workers, we finally found it.  We bought our tickets for downtown Seattle and decided that we would eat at the Hard Rock Café, as we were quite ravenous!  When we got off the metro at the downtown station, it was raining which we thought was pretty funny.  When Brian called his mom to tell her we made it to Seattle, she asked if it was raining, and at the time it wasn’t, but I guess Seattle had to show us who was boss!  After eating and buying a t-shirt, we decided to do a little bit of walking to see if we could find anything else neat close by. 

As we turned the corner, we found a fresh market with a bay area right behind it.  The fresh market sold things from fish and octopus to paintings and necklaces.  One of Brian’s favorite things at the fresh market was the king crabs.  He talked about them all the time, but I had never seen one before, and boy was I shocked!  These things were definitely over 1 foot long; I can only imagine how tasty one would have been!!  We kept walking a bit more and discovered that Seattle was a bit, as I like to say, “sketchy.”  Maybe it was just the area of town we were in, but I was definitely ready to get back to the airport.  We were given advice to only carry what we needed out in town; which made me feel a little more unsecure.  When we were making our way out of the area and back to the metro, we walked past a table of guys smoking.  All I have to say is that was definitely not cigarettes they were smoking, and all Brian has to say is that he hopes he doesn’t pop on his drug test from inhaling the fumes!!

Once we got back to the airport after another 40 minute metro ride, we headed back up to the USO area where Brian crashed out in the bunkroom and I hung out on one of the chase lounges.  I decided that I didn’t want to fall asleep yet so that I would be more tired on the plane ride.  I talked with some of the other wives in the room and heard some stories about Okinawa and gathered more advice from them.

Finally at about 9:30, we headed down to get our tickets for the plane ride.  Boy, were we surprised when we saw the line for this!!  We found out later though that we were pretty lucky to only have waited for an hour instead of 2 or 3 hours for our tickets.  We were thankfully assigned seats beside each other.  After getting out tickets, we returned to the USO, but found that it was too crowded for us to even fit into, so we grabbed something to eat and headed to our gate.  We were both dead tired, but tried to stay up and watch some TV shows online.  I wasn’t very successful at staying awake, so we each grabbed a bench and attempted to sleep.  I personally kept waking up every 15-30 minutes, but Brian found steady sleep very easily.