Coming to America: Part 1

We left Okinawa on Monday, Nov. 8th. We got up at a reasonable time and caught the free shuttle to the Naha Airport for the first of our four flights. Here's Matthew on the free shuttle. We drove off of Kadena Air Base for the last time...saying goodbye to every little thing along the way.

I tried to take some pictures of things as we drove off base...mostly blurry.

Here we are at the Naha Airport in Okinawa getting ready to fly out. We posed in front of this picture of the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Waikiki - right next to the hotel we will be staying at in Hawaii.

Flight 1: Okinawa to Tokyo

The first flight was relatively short, 3ish hours, and the kids were pretty good. Anna did a little screaming 'cause she didn't want to wear her seat belt, but it wasn't too bad. We got into Tokyo in the evening and got a little dinner (Thai green curry, yum!) and got ready for our next flight.

Flight 2: Tokyo to Honolulu

As long as we've been here we've planned on taking a little stop on our way home in Hawaii, to break up the long flight home. So that's what we did. Our second flight was from Tokyo to Honolulu - about 6 hours long - and it DID NOT go well!!
Anna was tired but wouldn't sleep and kept screaming and tantruming during a lot of the flight. I was sitting with Anna and Scott was across the aisle with the sleeping Matthew. I couldn't help feeling a little bitter about it as I saw Scott watching movies while I tried to wrangle the screaming Anna. Scott did offer to trade off with me, but I wanted to stick with it. She screamed a lot and ended up spilling water all over her shirt, so we had to take it off and she sat there shirtless for most of the flight. She had a blanket to cover up with so she wasn't too cold. In the last hour or so she finally fell asleep (COME ON!!) which I was happy about.

To make things worse, there was A LOT of turbulence on that flight (godzilla like turbulence?)! And it just kept going. It was bad. I am very prone to motion sickness - I was the kid who would occasionally throw up on the school bus on field trips (humiliating) - but I have never thrown up on a big plane...until today. After about the third or fourth long bout of rough turbulence I lost it. Luckily I had the little bag handy and everything was contained. And the plane noise mostly masks the vomit sounds, which is nice. After the turbulence was over there was a sad procession of barf bags (of which I was a participant) that had to be walked to the back and thrown away in a special garbage. The flight attendants weren't too sympathetic and just kept saying "oooh" and "gross" as each of us added our contribution to the special trash. Come on guys, it's not our fault!!

There was more turbulence after that, but luckily I made it through without needing another bag.

Matthew was very good and fell asleep right away and slept most of the flight. Unfortunately in the last two minutes of the flight (literally the last two minutes!!!) he sat up, cried and announced he was plane sick and threw up all over himself. Scott didn't even realize what he was saying until it was too late. We ended up having to take all his clothes off since they were all soaked and yucky and I let him wear my zip up fleece with the arms cuffed up. Luckily we were just landing, so we would have access to our bags soon enough. We wiped him all off and he danced happily through customs and immigration in Honolulu in my purple fleece. And soon enough we had our bags and clean clothes for him to wear.

I almost cried when we walked into the Honolulu airport and saw the sign that said "Welcome to the United States!"
When we arrived in Hawaii it was 7am, Monday Nov. 8th. We left Okinawa at noon, Monday, Nov. 8th, so it was all a bit disconcerting. We got to our hotel at 9am and Scott used his charm to get us into our room 6 hours before check in. He gets the hero of the day award. We went straight up to the room and we all fell asleep for a few hours. It was so nice to get in there early.
More travel adventures to come!