Friday, September 28, 2012

Okinawa

We've been back from Okinawa for almost a week now. I have had no time to do a blog post as my Japanese 3 class is winding down and preparing for finals.

I will take a quick moment to say that Okinawa was so much fun. The ocean there is beautiful, the people were nice, the American bases (especially Kadena) were impressive. We loved every minute of our trip.

If anyone in mainland Japan is looking for a budget retreat, I strongly suggest Okinawa. We paid under $400 for two round trip tickets for 9 days. Air Asia is always having sales.

I will post more later.


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Monday, September 3, 2012

Forest Adventure - Odwara

John and I randomly decided to get out of the house for the day on Sunday. Saturday afternoon, I went to the Outdoor Recreation Center on base to inquire about their upcoming trips. Outdoor Rec is part of the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation Office on base. They arrange outdoor and adventure trips for the base population. On Sunday they had a trip to Forest Adventure Park in Odwara, Tokyo. The cost was reasonable at $70/person and it included transportation and entrance fees.

The Forest Adventure Park is a zipline obstacle course in the forests of Tokyo. When we arrived, it was pouring rain. We were asked to wait on our bus until the rain subsided or until the park was closed due to weather. The whole bus was extremely disheartened. At the final hour, when the park was about to make the decision to close, the rain let up and then stopped completely. Thank goodness!

We started the course with a lesson in how to use the ziplines and harnesses. The entire course was unsupervised, except for a few safety personnel on the ground. Learning to lock yourself into the zipline properly was important to your survival. After the introduction course, the fun started. The entire course was in the tree tops. You moved from zipline to zipline by going through various obstacles. One obstacle even included a free fall into a rope net.

We had so much fun! I got so dirty from falling back first into sawdust piles at the end of each zipline. These zipline parks are all over Japan, so maybe we'll try the one in Okinawa when we go there in two weeks!







Me doing the ring obstacle to get to the next zipline. I was pretending I was in Cirque de Soleil.















John doing the long step bridge.



There was lots of rope ladder climbing.


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