My Birthday Surprise

The weekend before my birthday, Spencer told me that we'd been invited to have breakfast with the Heaton's on Saturday morning. I thought that was a little odd since I knew Stacey was out of town, but didn't think much of it. When I asked what time and got the response, "7:30am," I was kind of surprised Justin would want to make breakfast that early. On my way to bed at around midnight on Friday night, I said, "Spencer are you sure you wanna do breakfast at the Heaton's so early? We could just have a good breakfast here and sleep in a little." But he said no, we would go. My response was, "Ok, but I'm going in my pj's."

Imagine my dismay the next morning when his alarm went off at 6:30am. He rolled over and said, "Ok, we're not really having breakfast at the Heaton's, but we're doing something else and you're gonna want to take a shower." So I dragged myself out of bed and jumped in the shower. We were, however, still taking the kids to the Heaton's to be babysat. And then when we got there, he said, "Actually, Justin's just watching Shawn and Syd's coming with us." I tried to guess all the different things we might be doing, but they were all wrong. Then we pulled up to the Aero Club on Kadena, and I had a slight panic attack in the car. We were going on a private plane ride.

My fear stemmed from the fact that I have known or read about too many people who have crashed in small planes, resulting in death or severe burns. After returning home safely from our trip to Thailand, I thought we were done with possibly life threatening adventures, but less than a month later we were signing away our lives again. I took comfort in the fact that should anything go wrong, we'd at least be able to land in the water.

We walked up to the little Cessna 172 we would be flying in, and a little more of my fear was swept away when I saw this picture of Snoopy on the side of it. It was similar to one of two pictures my dad regularly drew on programs in church, which we frequently used for passing notes to each other, so seeing it made me smile. And he coincidentally also loves airplanes.  

Shoutout to my Dad!

Spencer, Syd, & Me by our Cessna 172.

I'm not gonna lie, I felt totally cool wearing the flight headset. I thought Syd looked pretty darn cute in hers.

Once we were in the air, I started snapping away. The air was really calm during our entire flight- an answer to a silent prayer that I said during takeoff! The pictures were a little hazy because of yellow dust that drifts over from China every year. It didn't hold me back though, I still took like a million shots.

Kadena Marina. If you enlarge the picture, you can see a dragon boat team practicing in the shallow water near the beach.

Naval Kadena.

The lighthouse on Cape Zampa.

Manzano Point.

Our pilot, Lance, told us that President Clinton stayed at this hotel when he visited Okinawa for the G8 Summit in 2000. Most rooms cost $1,000/night, but the room he stayed now costs $3,000/night.

Crossing over Nago.

Syd got the short end of the stick when it came to seating. For most of the flight, the view out her window was just ocean, as Spencer and I had views of the coast. She got bored with it pretty quickly.

Kouri Island.

Hedo Point- the northern tip of the island.

600 ft. cliffs on the northwestern side of the island.

The vertical lines in the hillside mark the sites of landslides.

The windmill on the left lost a propeller during the last big typhoon. Yikes!

Shark's Tooth Point.

The black lines in the water are seaweed farms.

I kind of love this picture, with our airplane's wheel against the funky pattern on the ocean floor.

During the majority of the flight, Lance turned down the radio so we didn't hear air traffic control in our headsets. As we got closer to landing, he switched it back on, which was really confusing for Sydney. Since she didn't really understand what they were saying, she thought they were speaking Japanese. So she kept turning to me and saying, "Mom, I hear Japanese guys talking. Do you hear them talking?"

"Mom, do you hear the Japanese guys talking?"

Going in for a landing.

We had a great flight, it was certainly a fun surprise!