Day 5 of our Guam Vacation

Dear Friends, Family, and Readers:

      It is now time to end my updates about Guam...Kara will probably write one blog of her own talking about the whole trip at a later time.  I really don't have a lot to say about this day and I will be uploading all the 400+ photos of our Guam trip for people to view on Facebook.  I wanted to blog and share a few pictures before I posted them on Facebook.
   Since we had to leave our hotel by noon, Kara and I got up early and drove to the Tumon Bay touristy area and stopped to swim at Governor Flores Beach.  I felt I owed it to her since we really didn't swim a whole lot while in Guam.  While we were there, Kara was bitten by a fish or cut by the fins.  The fish left three lines on her calf bleeding.  It was honestly more like a scratch, but being a prepared kind of guy I took out my little first aid kit and gave her scratch a cleaning and a band-aid.  She didn't really want to go in the water much after that...but went in one last time after some prodding. When it was my turn (had to watch our stuff), I saw a lot of fish where some tourists were feeding them bread.  Most of them I recognized from Saipan except for the spotted one, which I don't remember seeing in Saipan.  I hope you enjoy the underwater pictures.  This particular beach is fairly deep and is not full of super sharp coral like in Saipan.
     After swimming, we went back to the hotel to change, pack up, and check out.  That took a relatively short amount of time.  We then went shopping for some last minute things that Kara wanted to shop for like new running shoes since she has decided to run two 5k races in June, one Duluth, MN and one in Omaha, NE.  If you are a relative or friend and want to support her the race in Duluth is called the "Boulder Dash" and the one in Omaha is called "Run for Trails" and will take place in Gretna.  I also bought some on sale running shoes for the gym since I haven't bought new running shoes since I graduated college (no joke). That was about our priciest purchase but was still relatively inexpensive considering everything we bought was on sale.  We went to some other stores too, but had to hurry to eat before our plane took off from the airport.        
     We decided to rush and eat at McDonalds.  Unfortunately, when we got to the airport we learned that our tickets had been given to other people (we were still there early by 30+minutes)!  Kara was livid, but I was trying to be as calm as possible.  When I asked the luggage checker why this happened, he told me that when you have an "international flight" a person needs to be at the gate an hour before boarding the plane!  I couldn't believe it, the itinerary says, "Please be there an hour early" not "You must arrive an hour early or we will sell your ticket to earn more money for the airline."   In the end the airlines did right by us and put us on the next flight back to Saipan (four hours later).  I think the thing that frustrated me most was getting through the security check point and hearing the intercom say, "Now boarding for Saipan" and we could have been on our plane... In the end, we arrived in Saipan safe and sound albeit later than expected.
     I hope you enjoy the pictures!  Remember to click them for a larger image.

Kara happy to get the chance to swim at another
beach before leaving Guam.

A panoramic view of Governor Flores Beach as it pointing the
camera to the north. 

A picture I thought would look funnier than it is...the joke is
supposed to be that we are two lovers pointing toward Two
Lover's Point haha

Some cool fish that I've seen before in Saipan.  The skinny/pointy
nosed fish are Needle Nose Fish.  They are not dangerous but
do have a habit of encircling swimmers making them feel uneasy.

The strange spotted fish I had never seen in Saipan.

Guam Vacation Day 4

Dear Friends, Family, & Readers:

     Since I am done grading and tutoring students for the day, I thought I would update our blog and talk about our Thursday in Guam.  One of the first things we did on our Thursday after sleeping in late and watching cable T.V. at our hotel was to go to the Ramada hotel down the road to swim.  The Days Inn, Guam has a deal with the Ramada that allows guests to swim at their pool.  The pool isn't anything special, but it was fun to relax in the sun and swim in water that was not salty.  We had fun just being together and reading the complementary paper that comes with being a guest at our hotel.  

     After the pool, we decided to drive around and in the process we stopped at Ritidian Beach at the northernmost point in Guam.  We went there because the friends we had met (Glenn & Sandy) told us that it was one of the beaches they were most impressed with.  In order to get to Ritidian Beach you have to drive on the incredibly bumpy and hazardous road that goes around Northwest Field (which used to land B-29 Bombers during WWII) and when the road abruptly ends there is a road that goes to the left and is nicely paved.  This road leads to Ritidian Point and snakes its way down to the end where the beach is located.  Ritidian was the location of a large Chamorro settlement 600 years before the Spanish arrived in 1521.  To the Chamorro it was called "Litekjan."  From 1668-1690 (22years), the Chamorro population on Guam dropped from 12,000 to only 2,000 due to the Spanish Chamorro War and European influenza.  By the 1680's, the Chamorro had abandoned their village at Ritidian.  Today, this beach is a beautiful white sand beach with virtually no litter on it.  While we were there swimming/snorkeling and just enjoying the sun there was a Korean orchestral group there having a lot of fun and being really loud as kids are.  Besides that minor annoyance of people having a good time, the only other thing is that the beach is relatively shallow.  My suggestion to anyone who goes there in the future is to bring some sort of shade as there is virtually no shade on the beach and unlike Saipan the beach is wide and if being in sun directly is not your cup of tea... bring something.  Luckily I brought an umbrella that made our time there a little more bearable.  It would make a great picnic area.  Oh, and one last thing I forgot to mention is that because this place was made a wildlife refuge in 1993 it is only open from 7:30am-4pm.

     After deciding to leave the Ritidian Beach area, we drove to a lookout point that the rangers at the War in the Pacific Museum told us would be beautiful and informative.  The first place we stopped was the Asan Bay Overlook Unit (so named on the map).  This overlook was where Japanese were positioned to shoot at Americans arriving at the terribly exposed Asan Beach where the Americans landed.  At the memorial is a list of military personnel that died in the battle and there are depictions in metal plating that show the forced labor of the Chamorro under the Japanese and the emancipation of them by the U.S. forces.  I was also touched by the marble monument dedicated to the local islanders who died at Pearl Harbor, of which there were twelve.  Having visited Pearl Harbor, I feel that their particular sacrifice was extremely sad and worthy of remembrance it it jump started a nation into a mode of industry and defense not often seen in history. We then drove further and found another overlook from which we could see Tumon Bay.  The picture is of the Tumon Bay area (if you visit Guam this overlook is not named to my knowledge so you just have to find it).

     After viewing such beauty, we got back in the car and Kara let me stop at a museum that only cost 3 dollars to enter.  I cannot remember the name of the museum but it was pretty cool.  They had all sorts of donated WWII automobiles and fully restored military vehicles used during the war in the Pacific.  I chose to share some of the historical pictures of people and things rather than the vehicles for the blog as I believe the people are more important.  Since Kara wanted to wait in the car and read, I promised that we would next try and find the Latte Stone Memorial Park in Guam.  Luckily, it wasn't too far from the museum we visited but was a bit tricky to find.  

     The last part of our day was meeting up with Glenn and Sandy and two of their three kids at the California Pizza Kitchen in the Tumon Bay tourist area.   I hope you enjoy our pictures. Remember to click on the pictures to view a larger image.

     

This is the view of Ritidian Beach from the beginning of the
road that snakes its way down toward the gate and entrance
to the beach.

A view of the gloriously clean and awesome beach of Ritidian.

Who else but Kara and I at Ritidian Beach, Guam (no idea why
our hair is so frizzy...)

A picture of the sign at the Asan Bay Overlook Unit showing
tourists what they see in the distance.  This is the same view
the Japanese gunners would have had of our troops landing
along the beach exposed.  You can see the peninsula and harbor
in our picture below. 

Kara and I at the Asan Bay Overlook Unit.

This is one of the metal memorial depictions at the Asan Bay
Overlook Unit.  It shows the Japanese rounding up the
Chamorros from church and farmland and forcing them to work.
The last section shows the American liberation of the island.

View of Tumon Bay from the un-named overlook area.

Picture I found striking at the $3 museum.
And stay they did.

This is Japanese General Takashi Takashina.
He was the commander of all the Imperial
Japanese on Guam.  He died in battle on July 28,
1944 during the battle of Fonte Plateau. 

This is a picture of Sgt. Yokoi  I mentioned in the
previous blog post. This was taken the day after his
capture 26 1/2 years after the wars end in April 1972.

The kid in me couldn't help but post a picture of the American
Bazooka rounds on display.

Picture of Kara standing in front of the latte stones at the
Latte Stone Memorial Park.  For some traditional locals these
stones may be a sore spot in their memory.  These stones are
original and were moved from their ancestral resting places
after the war because construction of the military bases
needed to occur. These particular stones are probably about
8ft tall.  They were taken from Mepo Village in the Fena Valley
and placed in this location in 1955 & 1956.  Latte Stone construction
occurred from 1100-1700 A.D.

Kara and I have seen this in Saipan, but if you didn't know what
a Chamorro house looked like this is how the latte stones
were used. 

Kara and I with two large hot fudge ice cream desserts from
California Pizza Kitchen (One was actually Sandy and Glenn's
but they wanted us to pretend haha)