We are the Stuarts (formerly of Imperial) now residing in Okinawa, Japan.

This blog started from a desire to bridge the miles as we were preparing to leave the USA for 3+ years. It has turned into much more. It's part travel diary, part personal reflection, part "sociology of military life" and part mommy-blog. We hope you read something here that is interesting to you (or at least not a total waste of your time).

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Conference Trip 09...Day One...Times Two


We left Okinawa early afternoon on October 1st, and after 23 hours of flights and layovers, arrived in Salt Lake City in the evening...on October 1st. And I guess I should mention, we only took the youngest 2 children with us. High school is a drag...WAY too hard to extract any children from for 2 weeks, let alone football playing, cross-country-running, AP class-taking, not-good-at-playing-catch-up children. (Another awesome benefit of home school).

Here's the rundown of the journey:



We got to the airport in plenty of time (thanks to Brenda Jones) and had some time to shop/fool around before our flight left.



Our first stop was Osaka. Hadn't been there since arriving in Japan last Christmas.


This looks an awful lot like Okinawa, actually.




Then we had to take a tram to the international terminal.






Friend John LaBanc happened to be on our flights through San Francisco.

Once in the international terminal, we had tons of time to kill before our flight boarded.



Jake chose to use his time wisely.



Then we had a long, horrific, heinous, harrowing, homicidally-justifiable flight to San Francisco. It was jam packed, sardine-style...and the rude man in front of Coree and I was about 7 feet tall and kept his seat reclined the entire time...even while he ate, so we had zero room.

When we got to San Francisco, we were exhausted and cranky...with another long layover.



What soothes crankiness better than chowder?



That's what I thought.

And no, there are no pictures...we were too hungry and cranky for photographs by the time the food arrived.

We arrived in SLC, got our rental car, checked into the hotel and crashed hard for the night.

The End...

1 comment:

Gina said...

A long hard journey but hopefully worth it. You've gotta love those massage chairs. It's on my shopping list for when I win the lottery!