GBR & Misawa Adventure Race

Sunday, September 1st, 9:00am! Woohoo! It's GAME DAY! GO BIG RED! Wait, what's that? The game was Saturday, August 31st at 7:00pm? Not for us! Ugh, we may have waited the same number of hours for the season to start, but it seemed soooo much longer since it wasn't until Sunday! We're gonna have to get used to this, games will be on Sundays and most will be at 1:00am because Nebraska plays a lot of morning games this year :( And even if our game is later there will probably be other good games on before ours that will be worth watching...which will mean a lot of short Friday night naps and EARLY Sunday mornings.
If our games aren't on BTN or American Forces Network channels hopefully we will be able to find a website to stream them from, if not it may become a long season in this house!

What better way to celebrate than with some red champagne??

On September 7th, Keenan and several of his co-workers participated in the Misawa Adventure Race...some people took it pretty seriously, others were more about just having fun...see below!

August Random Stuff

Wow! What a month August was for us! We went to some amazing festivals, saw some beautiful sites, plus our belongings arrived! It's been a little crazy and Keenan probably feels like I never let him relax on the weekends, but things should start to slow down right? Haha! I did get going on becoming a volunteer with the Red Cross on base. Will get "placed" somewhere within the hospital sometime soon. I also started shopping for some kimonos to send back home for my nieces' dance studio. They are going to do a Japanese inspired dance and I thought having authentic kimonos for their costumes would be cool.
Here's a few random moments from the month of August...mostly shopping...

This is a kimono shop in Towada City (19km = 12mi away, but about 30 minute drive). All the kimonos and obi (sashes) are 500 yen = $5.

Front of the store.

Couple rooms upstairs just had piles
of yukatas (cotton kimonos). 

So many boxes of obi's!

Hokoji Temple

Yay for a 4 day weekend! To start off the Labor Day weekend we ventured toward Nanbu town to pick some peaches. There are several farmers near Nanbu town that allow people to pick whatever fruit is in season (apples, peaches, grapes, cherries, strawberries, etc.) for an hourly all you can eat fee plus per kilogram for the fruit you want to take home. Unfortunately we didn't give ourselves enough time to get there and it was going to be too late for peach picking. We decided to see the Hokoji Temple and drive a little through the mountains.

Hokoji Temple was founded sometime between 1249-1256, the temple burned down sometime in the 1800's and was rebuilt. I believe the pagoda was built in 1949, but of course this is just information I find that may or may not be completely accurate/translated correctly.

Jodogahama and Sannoiwa

Decided to visit Jodogahama today, which is "Pure Land Beach". It's a beautiful beach area with some pretty cool rock formations. Jodogahama is about 175km (109mi) from Misawa and is along the Sanriku Coast and the city of Miyako. The weather forecast had looked promising, but shortly after reaching Hachinohe we encounter heavy rain and it was not looking good. Traffic was heavy (and slow) the entire way. We didn't even get there until around 1pm. I don't know exactly how long the drive took, but I think it was somewhere between 3-4 hours.

This was a scenic overlook area we stopped at...

These benches are interesting!

Beach Finds...

Spent a few days during the months of July and August wandering the beaches, already blogged about my first couple of finds and here's a few other "interesting" things I found. A couple are kinda gross, but still intriguing when I wonder how far away they came from. 

Vertebrae from what I think was a whale?