Posts Tagged ‘rental car’

So it has been just a little over two weeks since My wife and I left my old life in Tokyo and moved to the tropical island of Miyakojima. I am happy to say that things are still going great.

We have an amazing house that has a slight view of the ocean and is about 10 minutes walk from the harbor. It feels like we live in the country, but we live just outside of the city. It’s much bigger than our apartment in Tokyo, but costs less than half what we were paying.

Shopping for a vehicle has been a little more difficult. We rented a car for a month so we would have plenty of time to look, but it was difficult to find something worth while in our price range. Since the island is small and we were only planning to be here for a year, we wanted to spend as little as possible. The original plan was to rent for a year, but the local people we met told us we could save a lot of money by purchasing. They were right. We eventually found a nice little car for about $1,300 out the door. That is what it would cost us to rent for 4 months, so hopefully it runs well.

Even though it’s November, the weather is still warm (if not hot) and we are able to swim in the ocean several times a week. The water is warm and the life is amazing. I am an avid diver (I actually used to work at a scuba diving shop in California) and there is so much to see here. Yesterday we found a great spot that had literally dozens of clown fish.

The only difficulty so far has been getting internet. Our internet will be installed this coming Friday and I will try to post some pictures. In the meantime, I have found a �media center� where I can connect for free. The good thing is since we have no internet or TV, we have had to fill our time with swimming, fishing, dinner with new friends, and attending festivals.

Well it’s been a couple of weeks since Eri and I got back from our trip to Miyakojima. And some of the photos I took inspired me to add a photo gallery to the site. I installed Zenphoto today and am starting to put in photos slowly. You can find the full photo gallery here: simplistic thoughts photo gallery. Please leave some comments and let me know what you think. I have also made a few other changes to the site, including a new contact form in the side bar.

Miyakojima is a small island about an hour south of Okinawa. You can drive across the island in less than an hour. We flew out of Tokyo airport and arrived at Miyakojima at about 10:00am on Thursday morning. We had our rental car in about 30 minutes and were headed off towards our hotel.

We set the coordinates into the GPS and after practically driving in a circle, realized that it didn’t really work that well. We decided to use the map we had grabbed at the airport and use the GPS for a location reference. After a bunch of confusion we finally arrived at our hotel. Had lunch at the restaurant across the street, and enjoyed the warm clean air (don’t get too much of that in Tokyo).

We were able to check into the hotel a little earlier than we had thought and so put our stuff in our room and went for a swim in the ocean. The water was absolutely gorgeous and there was a lot of life. We even saw Nemo (an anemone containing one large clown fish and one very small one).

After coming back from our swim we decided to do some site seeing and drove a little ways down the coast.The weather was mostly cloudy as we were expecting thunderstorms, but still very beautiful. The entire island was a mixture of green and blue. Later in the evening we went for dinner, and then a massage. On the way back, the thunderstorm hit and the rain fell. There was so much rain that the rain pipe was literally shooting out pressurized water. We had some difficulty sleeping that night due to the thunder that lasted well into the early morning.

For the last night (or so we thought) we were comped a stay at a new hotel that had just opened. It was very nice, with a separate bedroom, private sauna, day beds, and dinning room. I found out later the normal cost is $350 per person per night. From there we continued our travels around the island and then received a phone call from the travel agency telling us we would need to leave earlier (after we had paid extra to leave later) due to a strike of the airline. They wanted us to catch an earlier flight to Okinawa and then hope on of the completely booked flights would open up to Tokyo. If not we would have to pay hotel.

I was having too much fun to be bothered by bad news and after a few phone calls. We had arranged to leave the day after on a guaranteed flight, had our additional night at the hotel paid for, and our seats from Okinawa to Tokyo upgraded to business class. Cost to us, 0$. Great job Eri!

We spent our last day walking around the beach and through the city enjoying the various shops. My personal favorite was the snow salt ice cream. I had already consumed 2 ice creams that day, but couldn’t pass it up, and I was glad that I didn’t. It was great.