Our "tourist" day........

The last Friday I was in Okinawa, all of us including Austen (who had worked graveyard the night before) headed off on our sightseeing adventure.  We went to:

Ryugujo Butterfly Gardens.  It is located in the more northwestern part of the island.  It is near the Ocean Aquarium we visited the last time I was here.  It took us almost 2 hours to get there.  It was very fun and worth the trip.

Again the butterfly garden is built into a hill.  Here is the view of the ocean from the top entrance.

 A picture of the family selvie......

 The little touches throughout the park

 You see these combinations of statues and flowers throughout Okinawa...

 Walking down the paths of the gardens....

There were lots of butterflies even in the open air part of the gardens but as soon as we went into the netted garden the butterflies were everywhere.

One made a landing on Tosha's sweatshirt.....

Tosha got the most amazing pictures...

I love these two shots of Niki with the butterfly on his hat.......

 Our selvie in a bamboo hut.......

 Austen with Cooper.....

And the tadpole hunt....there was a little stream and they noticed it had tadpoles in it.  It didn't surprise me that Tosha started "hunting" them but Austen joined right in as well. Don't worry---they let the poor fellow go free after his photo op.

 

Okinawa is a sub-tropical climate so it is basically green everywhere that man has not put a building or a road.  The diversity of the green is breathing taking.

Next we headed to Melody Road.  Check this out on youtube.   "Melody Road Okinawa."  In this one section of road, if you roll down your windows you can hear a melody played. This is a description of the song from the internet:  "The song is written as a duet between a man and a woman. In summary, it is a song of love and of hardship about a man from Shuri and a woman (origins not specified) longing to be with each other, never to be separated again. The song starts out describing a wonderful place with pretty mountains next to a beautiful ocean,... a place called Futami. And it is there, the couple wish to marry and to forget the past, to forget the war, and to live happily every after."

The music is created by grooves in the road.  You need to travel about 40 kph to get the best effect. The total piece of road is about 340 meters long.  It only is set up on one side of the road so you have to make sure that you go down the right one.  There are turn around spots to do it again...which we did.  I have to say it was quite a magical thing and very hard to explain.  If you ever go to Okinawa you must take this little drive.

I took this picture off the internet.

I guess there are other places that have these musical roads in Japan and maybe elsewhere.

After "Melody Road". we headed to Sea Glass Beach.  We had gone there last time and found some nice sea glass and I wanted to visit it again.  Our hunting was not as productive but you can't go wrong with sand and the beach.  We also stopped by another beach "Sand Dollar Beach" but no luck with good sand dollars either.

Sea Glass Beach

 Sand Dollar Beach

We were all very tired after this day but we had seen and done some fun things along the way.  For me, just driving the countryside is just a pleasure.