North to Ocean Expo Park

It's Doug's turn to share some thoughts.  Now before I continue on with the tourist stuff, I have to prove that I'm really here to teach college classes to real students.  So here's a look into my Anatomy and Physiology lab from a few weeks ago.  It shows that I really do have students and that they are doing real biology!

Since all of the hot and humid weather was blown away by Typhoon Vongfong, we've really enjoyed beautiful weather.  That combined with the fact that I'm off for a week, we decided to use Tuesday to head north and see some of the island that neither of us has seen.  We headed for Nago and to Ocean Expo Park, the site of the World's Fair in the 1975.  However, tourism at the park started dropping off so a huge aquarium was built on the site and opened in 2002.  At the time it was the world's largest aquarium and still ranks as #2.  We set the GPS for the Park and after driving the scenic route for about an hour and a half, we realized that we hadn't heard anything from our female tour guide/computer and that we were past the point we should have turned.  So we found some even more back roads and followed a coast line until it was time to stop for lunch at Cafe on the Beach.  Ellen still thinks that the word Cafe needs to be in the title to make sure there is food!  

After lunch we finally found Ocean Expo Park and spent several hours visiting the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium where we saw thousands of fish and learned about the sea life surrounding Okinawa.

The park has a number of other exhibits so we chose the Tropical Dream Center which is home to thousands of orchid varieties and other tropical plants.

To finish off our visit to that part of Okinawa we drove over a bridge and visited Sesoko Island, one of the many islands which can be seen from the larger island we live on.