Vacation

We took a weekend off in Nov- media free believe it or not- and went to another outlying island in the Okinawa chain of islands (there’s 160 islands total and 50 or so inhabited islands for those nerds out there). We took off on Friday afternoon and caught a ferry to the Tokashiki Island. Two months ago there was an underwater volcano in islands away from Okinawa but all the cooled lava or pumice has been washing onto the shores of Oki for a month now. It has affected the boating industry as well as the fishing but on the way out we just hit a couple patches and it wasn’t too bad.

A shuttle van met us at the ferry terminal (think small bus station), and drove us to our little log cabin.

Our supper was very Japanese. Stirfry, Okinawan Goya, rice, edamame and even chopsticks.

We had fun on the ferry and then getting dinner ready in the rustic cabin. They even had a snake fence all around the cabin and it’s neighboring cabin as the whole area was surrounded by jungle overgrowth.

We really enjoyed falling asleep as the wind blew cool air off the ocean down the hill and listening to the palm trees and bushes rustling. It was a good sound. Very different from the sound of cars driving by our bedroom windows.

The next morning, as rain began falling, the driver/manager came back to the house. He said that we had to make a decision as the storm coming in was going to push the pumice into the island bay and there was one boat going back that day- the one at 10 am. We would not be guaranteed to get out the next day, Sunday, so we should decide right then if we wanted to leave or not. We decided to go.

We packed quickly and then left on the ferry an hour later. The way back was not nearly as smooth! It was rough seas and because of the pumice our boat kept turning the engine off and on, so the stones wouldn’t get sucked in. The kids were slightly sick when we got off at the end and it was pouring rain pretty steadily. Not exactly an enjoyable end but we tried to enjoy the rest of our quiet days as a family.