{Oura Wan}

Let me first start by telling you a little bit about the Japanese(Okinawans). Here in Okinawa they have Lover's Hotels. BUT they are only available for up to TWO hours. Often times the parents of a household can only find the privacy to make love by getting OUT of the house. They are very private about this kind of thing. :) So, they created lover's hotels. This is how it works. The couple decides they want to make love, but know they can't do it in their home, so they steal away for a couple hours to the lover's hotel. You pull up to this covered BOOTH. They have many many selections of different kinds of rooms to choose from. You push the button for the room you want. It shows you what level to drive up to. Yes, there are levels 100-400. We drove to level 300. When we got to our level there was an arrow flashing to show us which garage to pull into. You pull into your covered garage. There isn't a garage door, but instead large plastic curtains. We closed those behind us and they had HEARTS all over the curtains. haha! Then you get out and you open your door to your room. We opened our door to find ourselves standing in a hallway, but on the otherside of the hallway was another door we opened, which then had steep stairs for us to climb to our room. There were slippers at the bottom of the stairs for us to use. Then our door suddenly LOCKED behind us. We are now locked in until we pay. You have to pay to leave otherwise you can't leave. We climbed to our room to find a TWO story bedroom. The first floor had a tv, a slot machine, karoake and a big couch. Then we climbed the spiral stairs up to the second floor. The second floor had a bed, another tv, xbox, karoake(the japanese love karoake), high tech shower and a high tech toilet. haha...you can imagine. Oh, i forgot...you then climb a few more stairs and open a door to your very own pool. Yeah. It was crazy. It's the coolest , yet WEIRDEST thing i have experienced. They are VERY private about it and want to make sure you have extreme privacy. As soon as we entered the room the phone rang. And this lady in a secretive, serious, whispering voice asks me "do you have a coupon?" I said , no. She said "ok. bye." it was hilarious. Then when you check out, you check out in a little spot right outside your door. It tells you how much you owe and you send your money through a tube, just like at a BANK. You never see the people at the front desk. You never see anyone. It was so funny.

After that we headed to Oura Wan. It's located on Camp Schwab on the East side of the island. We heard they had nice cottages right on the beach so i decided to make it happen. I left our friends in charge of our kids for three days and we were off. One of the first things we did was go to a place called "Pizza IN THE Sky". It's a yummy pizza restaurant. It's high on top of a mountain with an awesome view looking out to the ocean. We ate outside. They had christmas music playing. But not the traditional singing music. Do you remember those old , almost kid-like pianos...that sound like children pianos when you play them? I don't know how to better describe it. Well, it was a little piano that played one key at a time all on its own. It was so cute. Here is the salad we ordered. Doesn't it look good? Well, it was good.

Then we got our pizza....they put corn on their pizza, but it was good. :)

This cute little drink was tasty, but was expensive. It cost us $6.00. Water cups here in Japan are tiny at any restaurant you eat at. As you can see from the blue cup. :)

A picture of us standing outside the entrance of Pizza in the Sky.

When you leave the restaurant here is the view you have on the other side. It's so pretty.

Then we went to a place called Pineapple Park. It's everything PINEAPPLE. You take a little tour on these cute little pineapple cars. Can you see the back end of the car in this picture? It takes you through and shows you all the different ways pineapple plants can look and how they are grown. Shane and I both thought pineapple were grown in trees. Nope. They are grown in the ground.

Baby pineapple...One of the days we headed to Kourijima Island. I have heard good things about this island and have been wanting to go for awhile. You have to ride on about a 1 mile or more bridge to get to the island.

There was lots of farmland and there are lots of random roads that go down into these farmlands. You just have to pick one and hope it leads to the beach. We picked one road that led to the perfect spot. There was one other couple there. It was a quiet beach that looked like it hadn't been walked on very often.

We walked down until we reached a spot where we thought we couldn't walk anymore. We climbed a few rocks and looked on the other side and there was another LONG beautiful empty beach. So, we headed over there. I found tons of seaglass...

Here is shane walking ahead looking for some cool shells.... In this picture you can see where it looks like it ends once you reach that rocky fixture...but in fact, we could walk around that part b/c the water was shallow enough and then that led us to ANOTHER empty beach. It was sooooo beautiful and so awesome experiencing that island. Here in Okinawa, it's not really a good place to do surf boarding. There are many reefs that break the waves before they can come in to shore. That's the great thing about this place too...the reefs. So much beauty under the water to see.

This picture is a view while driving across the bridge to get off of Kouri island. The water is that blue and that beautiful. I am amazed constantly by how blue the water is...

We also went back to Churaumi Aquarium. We wanted to see the dolphin show. And it was so fun. The dolphins did things i haven't seen at Sea World. They made all five dolphins make their squealing sounds at the same time. It was LOUD and so cool. And you can see how awesome the view is. The ocean is right behind the show and it was just so cool. The dolphins did all kinds of jumping tricks...more than i have seen at a show. They would jump out of the water , flip, and kick the ball in the air with their fin. It was so neat.

Here we are , early morning, taking a picture right outside our cottage....

We decided to drive all the way to the Northern tip of the island...Cape Hedo. We drove on the EAST side. There are so many cool and beautiful sites along the way. There are some fun things to do along the way that we didn't do. The drive is beautiful. There isn't anything during that whole drive. It was about a two hour drive i think. It was just dense forest. LOTS of mountains and trees everywhere! We stopped to look at a few dams. That was cool. Here in this picture we decided to go to a Cape...i don't remember the name of it. It was pretty.

Here is Cape Hedo. We were so glad when we finally arrived. I was REALLY glad b/c the twists and turns we endured on the roads during that drive made me SICK. I have never experienced twisty turny roads like that in my life. I thought Colorado and Utah roads were twisty and turny when going through the mountains...nope. This was crazy and i never get sick if i am sitting in the front seat, but i did.

Do you see that beautiful blue?! We both thought it looked like DYE in the water. It was gorgeous.

I took a picture of a wave crashing up on the rocks....

Another picture at Cape Hedo...

One of our last adventures was our hike at Hiji Falls. Here is the sign they put up for Americans. Can you go through and find all the mispelled words? It's so funny!

After about a 25 minute hike through dense woods we reached the Falls. The hike was GORGEOUS. Really. You walked along side the stream the whole time. The water is amazingly clear and beautiful. It was just gorgeous. There are lots of signs to watch out for snakes...particularly the HABU. :) BUT we ran into MORE spiders than ANYTHING. Banana spiders are EVERYWHERE and they are HUGE. One time shane ran into a web...no spider...and he PANICKED! Not kidding. I was walking in front of him and he yelled and RAN and totally pushed me into the wall of rocks and ran!!! hahahahahaha! I will never forget it. When i say shane is terrified of spiders, that is an UNDERSTATEMENT. :) He dreams about spiders attacking him all the time and always wakes me up b/c he freaks out in his sleep. hahahaha! We will never forget that moment. After that he was on the look out for spiders the whole time. We often times were walking right under a spider web with a huge spider on it.

We love these big plants! We want to frame one in our house.

This tree down here is one that take on the look just like a palm tree except the leaves are ferns instead of the actual palm tree leaves. AND it has this awesome pattern all on it's trunk. Isn't that neat?!

Oh, here is the largest banana spider we saw. I am not sure if you can really get a picture for how large he is...? The hike was an awesome one and we are glad we did it. It was so quiet and beautiful. It was an awesome workout too. It was tons of climbing . TONS. And they were pretty steep hills too.

We really enjoyed our anniversary getaway. It was short, but it was perfect for us. We were ready to see our boys again.

We were able to take our bikes up there and go for a ride. It was so nice to actually be able to ride together...that is until shane almost got hit by a car and i crashed into a ditch. That's another story. That was the only ride we went on while we were gone. :)