My sweet friend Dale and I decided to take a road trip up north to see the beautiful Azaleas! We are both boy moms and my boys had seen about as many flowers as they wanted to see for awhile so we decided to drive up to see them! It ended up being a little further than we thought so we had a few adventures along the way. That’s what makes Okinawa so fun is all the little things you find when you take a wrong turn. The flowers were absolutely beautiful!!
We saw a sign to pick strawberries and if you have ever lived in Okinawa you will know how excited we were because it costs about $7 for about 4-5 strawberries at the commissary on base. We followed all the signs to the strawberry field to end up at a place with a few greenhouses and couple of dogs that didn’t seem to want us there so we decided we might try that another day! We did find a hidden gem along the way! Dale collects pictures of all the different manhole covers in Okinawa and we found this one of a man in a kayak. Many Japanese cities, towns, and villages have manhole covers that are printed with different designs that tell a story about what makes their town special. The designs began in Okinawa but can now be found all over mainland Japan as well.
To end our road trip we decided to take a trip down Melody Road. Up north in a little town called Futami there is a section of road that if you drive over it at 40 kph you will hear an Okinawan folk song. In 1945 during the war in Okinawa, two Okinawans were told by US forces that they needed to leave the town they were living in that was in the southern part of the island. They moved up north to Futami just days before the end of the war. They decided to write a song about their new home.
