October 20, 2007 (Day 8)

Today is the day that we would fly over to Kwajalein Atoll. we got up and packed and said goodbye to Isaac and other people that we had gotten to know during the week. The flight was fairly short and we arrived. Once we got off the plane, we went inside of the airport and we had to line our bags up against the wall. This is a military base, so everything had to be checked out by guards and dogs to make sure that everything was safe and secure. Once this was all done, we filled out some paperwork and got our temporary ID's done. Finally we were allowed to leave and we grabbed our bags and went outside. Then we met Ona, who was technically our host while we were there, although we didn't actually stay with her, we had our own house to ouselves, which was very nice. She had Ava with her as well, Ava is her daughter. She was only a little over a year older, and she was so incredibly cute. We walked around the airport for a little bit and looked at some old WWII relics. Then some Marshallese kids and an adult came up to us and presented us with flower leis, which were very beautiful. The man's name was Julian and he was the principal of one of the schools over on Ebeye island. He had brought with him a few of his students as a welcoming committee for us, which was awesome. We loaded our bags onto the truck, which would take them to the house we were staying at. We said goodbye to Ona and Ava and went out to lunch with Julian and the other kids. Shelby and I had a great time talking to and getting to know the other kids, they were all right around our age, so it made a little bit easier to connect with them. After lunch we walked back to the boat dock with them because they had to return to Ebeye for the night. They were only given day passes and had to leave the island at a certain time. After we left there, we walked over to Ona's house and picked our bags and carried them over to our house, which was right down the street. the house had three rooms, so Shelby and I had to share a room again, but it was pretty big, so it wasn't so bad. After we were finished settling, we sat down and talked about we would do for the rest of the day. Ona had mentioned that we could borrow her snorkel gear if we wanted to, I had never gone snorkeling before, so Shelby, Jacqueline, and I went snorkeling while Fielding went over to talk with Ona. Snorkeling was so much fun. I saw some very amazing looking fish that I had never seen before. The coral was also very beautiful. Shelby then came over to Jacqueline and I and told about this little fish that charged at her as if it were attacking. We, of course, laughed at her and went to check it, but the evil little fish attacked us too and Jacqueline pulled a muscle in her leg. Despite the evil little fish, the experience was amazing and I'm glad we did it. Later on we found out that the evil little fish was called a Picasso fish, which suited it well because it looked sort of wonky. Once we got back to our house, Fielding had rounded up some bikes for all of us to use to explore the island with. We started out and Mr. Fielding took us down to the turtle pond, which was really cool. We rode all around the island and then went to the store to pick something up for dinner. We went back home and cooked dinner and Shelby, Jacqueline and I started playing the food chain game. However we were all very tired at that point because we had done quite a lot of exploring and running around that day. We ended the game a little early and went to bed.