Let's start at the very beginning....

At long last....we have our "blog." Hooray!

And since it's been about a month and half since Kevin and I got here to Okinawa...I figure we'd start from the VERY beginning....

We left the U-S (Washington Dulles airport) on September 30th.... We had a direct flight from Washington Dulles to Narita (Tokyo) airport.... Thank goodness Kevin had mileage with United, so we were able to get upgraded to business class. It makes a huge difference when you are traveling on a 13 hour plus flight. Sitting in business class, Kevin and I were both able to recline our seats quite a bit and get some much needed sleep. In the days leading up to our departure, we had been cleaning our condo in Silver Spring getting it ready to show to prospective tenants... We spent almost two days cleaning it from top to bottom, making fixes, and re-painting ( I don't think our house was ever this clean when we lived here). We couldn't have done it all without the help of Mom and Dad Miller...

So back to our flight...After a 13 hour flight to Tokyo, we arrived at Narita airport. We had a brief layover here before we flew on a domestic airline into Naha airport in Okinawa. I had no idea Okinawa was so far. We had to fly another 3 hours from Tokyo just to get to Naha. Actually, looking at a map of the world, Okinawa is very close to Taiwan. Interesting...

Once we arrived at Naha, we were greeted by Kevin's sponsor Melody Jensen who picked us up and took us to what would be our home for the next 3 weeks--The Westpac Lodge on Camp Foster.

Kevin and I were so exhausted that first night we didn't bother unpacking, we just crashed.

The next day we woke up at 6:30am (jet lag of course) to a beautiful sunrise here in Okinawa. This is what we were expecting. Paradise.

The week after our arrival was pretty much full of orientations, meetings, etc as Kevin and I tried to get acquainted with our new surroundings.

At first, the weather and climate was awful. Even though we were told we just missed the "hot" season arriving in October, Kevin and I were sticky and sweaty from the humidity. We couldn't walk without breaking a sweat. The heat was really something. The other problem was we did not have a car. Living in Okinawa means you have to have a car--we quickly figured this out the hard way. The Westpac Lodge wasn't within walking distance to anything, so we had to rely on our sponsor (Melody) to get us around. She had to drive us back and forth like a chauffeur. :)

We decided our first priority was to buy our first car. We looked at quite a few dealerships on the island (even the so called "lemon lots" at Kadena AFB and Camp Foster) before we settled on my car: A Mitsubishi BJ Topo Wide. It's a cube family like car (of course very popular here in Japan). Here's a photo:



Kevin later bought his own car: a Mitsubishi Pajero Junior. A kind of a mini jeep looking car with 4WD. Both cars were bought for $8,500. Quite a deal...

After finding our vehicles, we moved on to our next priority. Finding our house.