Watson Sushi: Last Days in Misawa

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Last Days in Misawa

It is hard to believe that we are not going back to Misawa after visiting family and friends. It is hard to believe that Misawa is not our home any more. Nevertheless, I cannot get sappy at this point because we still have so much life to look forward to.

I do want to recap what we did on our last few days in Misawa. We were checking out of our house on July 27th (Alex’s birthday, which I still need to blog about). Life was very busy at that point with all last minute packing, but we still carved out a minute and went for a quick jump/run/roll at the base beach trying to catch last rays of the sun. Kids just wanted to have their last pictures taken by Lake Ogawara.

And Mark was eating his bowl of frozen blueberries, so we brought it along too.

And this is what we did for the next thirty minutes.

The morning of July 27th was rather hectic. We got up at 7 am, had Alex open his presents, and right when we were finished by 7:30 the people who picked up our loaner furniture showed up. Then kids played for a while with the new wooden building blocks and by 9 am, the older kids were gone to Vacation Bible School on base and Mark was getting ready to go to his friend to play.

Robert and I cleaned and packed as fast as we could. Our check out was at 2 pm. Thankfully, our housing policy on PCS cleaning is not very strict, but I could not tell how much I had to clean. I believe I still cleaned to much just because I couldn’t believe that, for example, I didn’t have to wipe any walls or wash windows. Robert had to run to the post office to mail a couple more boxes with bedding and towels. He picked up kids from VBS and somehow did not get home till 1:30 pm! I was panicking because I still had a few things to finish up and pack. It was 90 F outside and only one fan left inside—I was dying…

My good friend showed up and offered to take all the kids to her house for a couple of hours. That helped a ton, as you can imagine! Anyway, the inspector was very kind and polite, let us keep our food from the fridge till the very last minute. Said we had no problem passing the inspection and we were “free to go”.

And then……Robert’s name was taken off the rack by our entrance door. The house was not ours any more…I think that was the moment when I got most emotional in these “pre-moving” days. I was tired and hot and just wanted to cry that this was it! Here is our last picture in front of “our” house. I am trying to hold back my tears.

Yes, that was sad. But we had to move on. So we took all our suitcases and boxes to the hotel, got a bit settled and picked up the kids from my friend’s house. It was time to celebrate Alex’s birthday, but I’ll have to tell you about that in another post.

For the next four days we were simply enjoying Misawa. We did many “last” things. It was really bitter sweet. We tried to hang out with our friends as much as possible. We went to the beach twice since it was soooo hot. Our hotel rooms were like a baking oven with only a couple of tower fans provided (they don’t work nearly as well as big circle ones).

Many friends joined us at the Miss Veedol Beach. They finally rebuilt it for us to enjoy this summer.

Alex really enjoyed babysitting Marie for the last time Smile

Oh, we’ll miss being so close to the ocean and beautiful coast!

On Monday night (Jul 30th), we got to hang out with our old friends, the Frosts. They came up from Yokota (Tokyo) base for a week so we took them to our favorite curry place in Misawa. Robert had his favorite Beef with Garrik (we think it means garlic Winking smile

On Tuesday, July 31st, originally we were planning to just get organized and packed and spend the day nearby, but it was still so hot in the hotel, that we had to get out. So we went to the beach at 8:30 in the morning. By noon we were at the Shimoda Mall to enjoy our last lunch at Pepper Lunch.