December 27, 2008

Comprehensive Park in Okinawa City

The second park we went to today was awesome! Definitely a park we will be heading back to soon. In the few hours we were there, we just saw a fraction of the park- it is huge.
There are miles of running and biking trails (including marked 3K, 4K & 5K courses), a track, a stadium, a carp pond, water slides& water park, paddle boats, miniature golf playgrounds, tennis courts, picnic areas....so much!

Our first stop was eating our picnic lunch. We felt like giants- all the tables (and other seating too) were LOW to the ground.

After playing football and Frisbee in the big open field we went through this torii gate

and checked out the carp. We didn't see any of the turtles, but LOTS and lots of carp! There were a couple of families feeding the carp so we hung around and watched.

They come right up- David was even able to touch one. They were almost cute as they begged...

but at the same time they are a bit freaky- they open their mouths really wide and make weird sucking noises...a little eerie sounding! I am hoping I don't have nightmares from that sound...




Next time we are going prepared with popcorn or bread to feed the fish (apparently you can also buy food from machines there too).

We followed the trail up over two bridges and found this in the middle of the tail. Looks like a sundial and compass.



This playground was wonderful- we had a great time climbing on this rope jungle gym. It was huge!








the trail we were on T'ed into a trail following along the coast line. These benches were sheltered by huge "oyster shells"- pretty wild looking.

By now the sun was setting and we called it a day. Heading back to the car we stopped by some soda machines to check out some of the different sodas- there were several we had not seen before. You just can't believe all the choices you have here for drinks out of vending machines! As I said before, the boys claim this is their favorite thing about Okinawa. We loved the look of these three...unfortunately we couldn't try them as we only had 90 Yen and a 500 Yen coin, and the machine would not take the 500 yen coin for some reason.