So today we went on a little adventure to find the Itoman Peace Illuminations Festival. I thought I had researched it enough and was pretty confident that it was at the Peace-Prayer Memorial Park. So We get directions and hop onto the Okinawa Expressway and make our way south. Using a handy little app on my Iphone called Maps, we were able to navigate our way to the park! You just drop a pin and tell it to give you directions to the 'pin' from your current location. It's a nifty little GPS. Without it, we would've been completely lost. It's not very easy to find your way around when all the signs are in Kangi :) After a shorter than expected 45 minutes we arrived at Peace Prayer Park.
It was beautiful here. The weather was actually chilly enough for us to wear sweaters! As we walked around there was enough room for Sean to run around and burn off some of the pent up energy from sitting in the car.
As we went a little further, we walked through the Memorial Garden and straight ahead of us was a neat burning fountain that is called The Cornerstone of Peace. With the ocean as the backdrop, the view was beautiful!
After walking around the Park for a little bit, 6pm came around when the lights were supposed to be lit up. We didn't see any light at all. We walked around the park for probably another 20 min trying to see if they were tucked around a corner, but after looking at the deserted parking lot we decided I must've gotten the location wrong. So I googled it again and found out it was at the Itoman Wine Farm instead. So I put in the address given into my handy little GPS and started driving the way it told me to. Come to find out it wasn't as handy as I thought. It led us to the Itoman City Office? What? Well, I yet again had to pull out google and do some more researching. By this time, Sean was throwing a tantrum in the back seat because he was tired of sitting in the car and we still hadn't eaten dinner and it was 7pm! Even though he had eaten 2 small 100 calorie packs of cookies :) After a little googling, I came upon a page that said the Itoman Wine Farm was directly across from the Peace-Prayer Park! Go figure! So we drive back to the Peace-Prayer Park and actually gave up and started to head home. Then we see the sparkling lights of success, no pun intended LOL So we turn into the parking lot to the wine farm and head into the entrance.
After walking through an isle of food and fair games, we finally see the field of lights up ahead! It was a pretty cool sight!
There was a cute little train for Sean to climb on.
After walking around looking at the lights we looked in the little gift shop they have for the wine farm and got to taste a couple different wines that turned out to be pretty good!
Then we grabbed a bite to eat at one of the stands they had. We don't really know what we got, but it was pretty good! Sean got a corn dog that he loved! He always gets one of those at any festival we go to.
I got a funky looking yet really good thing with yakisoba. Haha! The best way I can explain it is some kind of dough they mixed with cabbage and pork slices and grilled until the dough was kind of bready in some places and yummy gooeyness in others. Yum! Then they topped it with some kind of sauce I can't even explain, but still oh so good!
Chris can't even explain what he got. All he said when asked was "It had eggs in it with veggies and some kind of mayo sauce." LOL Vague, but he said it was good. That's the best part about living in a foreign country. There's all sorts of crazy foods to try :)
Finished off with some Lemon tea.
All in all, a long day that was as frustrating as it was fun. Sean had his moments of meltdowns when he didn't want to wait for mommy to find out where we were going and it seemed like they were teaming up on us. When Sean finally was content, Kyle would start crying. I think it was worth it! I was able to keep our family tradition of seeing Christmas lights every year, even though we are halfway around the world in the middle of the Pacific :) God is good!
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