March 22nd '06- The Beach

Okinawa is known for it's beautiful beaches. We lost part of our day to playing musical hotel rooms. The Airforce Inn is planning to renovate our room so we had to move upstairs to an identical room. So after lunch we hired a taxi and had him drive us to Torri Station beach. Torri Station is a small Army post tucked in to part of the island between Marine bases. It seems silly but when we drove through the gates and we found out it was Army property I felt like we were home - in safe territory. That is until we pulled up outside the beach facilities and the place was a ghost town. Everything is closed on Wednesdays - just our luck - but the taxi driver found an open gate for us and dropped us off. Because everything appeared to be closed, and we had no cell phone (Cingular disappeared after Guam) Rob asked the taxi driver to come back in 4 hours. The weather was a bit overcast and it looked like rain was on its way so it didn't seem like such a good idea to stay after the taxi left but we crossed our fingers that the taxi would come back and made the best of it. The beach was beautiful and the water warm (in comparison to Monterey) and there was a resort area within walking distance. There was a guy out in the ocean kite surfing - I think they call it kite boarding - so we didn't feel completely lost.

Other than that, we were basically alone on a beautiful beach. Robert and I started building sand castles and Katherine was tired so she just lay on the beach for a while.Katherine's sandcastle...

Just when the skies were looking their most ominous and I was formulating a plan for where we could get shelter if we had to the clouds broke and suddenly we had the most beautiful day we'd had on the whole trip.
We all relaxed and explored the beach and played in the edge of the water. We found big chunks of coral and tiny little black and white seashells that looked as though someone had expertly painted on black spots or stripes in neat even rows. Katherine and I went for a walk and found something that mystified us. It looked like a cross between a pineapple and a coconut. She insisted we take a picture so we can ask her science teacher.



To be continued...