marathon day

not literal marathon.  we spent saturday driving around the southern end of the island.  in 14 hours, we visited 5 "castles", a glass factory, Peace Memorial Park, and a couple other random spots. 

around Gushikawa-jo:

glass factory:

Peace Memorial Park contains dozens of separate memorials, including the cornerstone of peace, which lists the names of the 240,000 people killed in the Battle of Okinawa:

Itokazu-jo:

the Honda Fit we rented for the week came with a gps.  i've never believed in using navigation systems; generally i think that if you pay attention to the real world, and use a map when necessary, you should be fine.  but the gps turned out to be our friend when the maps we had didn't have quite enough detail and since lots of roads aren't really named or at least not marked with names.  having the gps allowed us to take some "shortcuts", including this very narrow, very steep road (and yes, there were some vehicles coming the other direction) up to the next castle:

but we made it up to Tamagusuku-jo, parked the car, and were headed up the trail when we spotted... a mongoose.  we have video of it, which we haven't uploaded yet, but no pictures unfortunately.

we also stopped at Chinen-jo, Sefa Utaki, Ozato, Shuri-jo, and Urasoe-jo.  mostly those pictures are a lot more trees and rocks.  but at Urasoe, when we had just come through a rain shower, we spotted the second rainbow of the day:

dinner was at Peter's Place, a Chinese restaurant that was one of e's favorites as a kid and is run by the parents of a former classmate.