A New Park

Spring in Okinawa starts near the end of January. Winter and early Spring are the best times to go to parks in Okinawa; summer is WAAAAYYYY too hot to be outside in a non-water related activity. On a nice spring day, we found a new park on our way home from a birthday party. I'd driven past the signs for it about a hundred times, but we were feeling adventurous and decided to actually follow them. I'm so glad we did!

From the road where we parked, we could see two playgrounds and this funky net tree.

Then when we walked closer, we realized that hill leading down to the net tree was a giant concrete slide! It didn't look too intimidating from the side, but from the top it looked really steep. Steep enough that Spencer and I were both too scared to go down it!

While I hung out with Kate, Spencer and the kids walked down some stairs to give the net tree a try.

Sydney quickly got stuck and needed Spencer to rescue her; Shawn shortly followed suit, losing a shoe about 2 seconds into his climb.

After ditching the tree, they climbed up the ladder by the slide.

See how steep it is??

Sydney loved it.

Syd eventually wanted to go down the slide, and asked me to go with her. I was still kind of scared, but I figured if my 5 year old was willing to do it, certainly I could muster up the courage to do it too! And lucky us, we survived (even if I did land on my bum in the sand at the bottom)! Spencer eventually went down too, but he took a little more coaxing :)

By the playground area for little kids, we all had fun playing on a teeter totter and taking turns pretending to surf on that platform in the middle of it.

Look at Spencer's form! He's a natural.

Kate was oblivious to our fun, but looked cute in her carseat. It was pretty windy outside, and I tried to keep her shielded from those gusts of air in her face.