Winder Family

This week we fed the missionaries, and went

• bowling with Tatyana and Richard
• a Camp Zama Army Band Christmas concert (We are friends with the Castilles; he's the pianist and she is the cellist in the band)
• our base Army vs. Navy flag football game (Navy won)
• a holiday bazaar at Ranger Gym where I got some fun Japanese items
• a Christmas party hosted by Ernestine Bowen (Read 180 teacher at Lanham ES)
• had Sunday dinner with the Randalls and Chapmans and
• attended a Christian Christmas Couples get together. 

We had a busy, happy week as we start getting ready to come home for Christmas.

This week began with the sister missionaries joining us for dinner and a game of bowling.  Sister Cheney and Sister Neff are cute and we love them.

This week's  highlights include:

Greg assisting the 5th and 6th grade teachers as they hosted a Japanese school's students in a multi-cultural day.  Greg taught the kids crab soccer which is a oldie but goodie game in PE.

Crab Soccer at Ranger Gym

Atsugi NAF also celebrated its 65th anniversary.

Before and now

However, the highlight of the week on base was the return on the sailors who had been on the USS Ronald Reagan for the last 6 months.  (They came home for 2 weeks in November but returned back to boat duty.)  These sailors will be here for the next 5-6 months before going back out to sea duty again.

This week went by fast with work because of the long weekend.  Some highlights from Thanksgiving include going to Yokosuka with the Randall family, running the base turkey trot, bike riding around town and church on Sunday.

Anytime we go to Tokyo, we find overload sensory experiences.  This week did not disappoint as Hoai My went on a girl's night out with Katie and McCall to the Robot Restaurant.  

The week ending November 15, 2015 was buzzing on base as people were talking about the concert Friday night.  We had no idea who Switchfoot is.  We knew we wanted to go to the concert giving in to 1-nothing else to do 2-it's free and 3-peer pressure.  We started to brush up on our Switchfoot the day of the concert listening to their music on Youtube.  To our delight, they are awesome.  The concert was absolutely amazing.  It was held at Trilogy, which is a small venue.  It was full of families and very personal.  Often, the band came down from stage, walked and sang among the crowd.  One band member paid an awesome tribute to the military, particularly, the Navy.   Greg took a video of one instance when they came down and sang and I was right behind them.  Excuse my lunatic fan facial expression.

This week ended with a trip through MWR to Mt. Nikko.
This trip was a 4 hour bus ride from Atsugi NAF.  The pictures once again does not do justice to how beautiful this visit was.  We also could have spent days there and not explored all the different trails and points of interest.  On this trip, 2 fellow teachers went and it was great fun to be with them - Ms. McCarthy and Roddie.

We were excited to be able to get reservation at the Sanno Military Hotel in downtown Tokyo for our 29th anniversary.  (Thank you Richard Batimana aka Batman.)