Watch out Disney, here's comes Nago Pineapple Farm!

So the Nago Pineapple Farm was just too amazing to be true! We drove from Okinawa City to Nago and it takes about 1 hour 15 on the back roads with me driving... and when we pull up to this place we are greeted by a HUGE 20-foot high pineapple flanked by dancing Okinawan Oranges. It was like I had won the weekend lottery for fun places to go. You walk into the "park" and pay your 5 dollars, and you are given a ticket for the amusement park ride of your life!

You can see in the last pic posted that we were all put onto these self-propelled golf cart transformed into the coolest Jurassic Park-type pineapple rides. If these things had spinning rims, one woul dhave come home with me for sure. So anyway, we load into these pineapple carts with iPods attached to the roofs with radios zip-tied and duct-taped to the roofs, where some very Japanese person is trying to speak some English dialogue to us about the park... too funny!

I would like to skip to the third picture of the random palm trees for just a moment. The look a lot like bamboo shoots, but do not be fooled! According to our pineapple cart voice, they are called "ass-lick" palms. I could be wrong, it's been known to happen, but I swear that's what the lady said! Moving on...

The second picture down with the little mini-pineapple looking pink flowers are actually baby pineapples. They grow from a plant in the ground that kind of looks like an aloe plant, but smaller, and the flower on top it actually the fruit once it growns up big and... piney.

The pic on the top with the HUGE pineapple in the field sorta shows how low the plants grow... and according to the lady on the radio, "the word pineapple actually comes from two seperate words, pine and apple." I kid you not, that's what the radio said... it's too perfectly hilarious for me to even try to make up!!

So anyway, there's the random self-taken pic in the cart of Mike and I. Aside from laughing out asses off at the terrible narration from the radio, it was interesting to learn there were like 200 edible types of pineapple, and that it actually comes from those two seperate words, pine and apple... who woulda thought!!

So after you take the little 10 minute cart ride, they force you to walk through a little shell museum and then into a little gift shop, go figure. Once you make your way through all that comes the ultimate part of the trip, which makes the 5 bucks seem like chump change... it's FREE SAMPLES!!! I mean this place makes Sam's club look like amatures!

They gave us pineapple-flavored everything, from wine, champagne, cake, juice, cut fruit, chocolate, pie, cookies, cooking vinegars (which I actually purchased), pineapple charcoal as air deodorizers, facial scrubs, lotions, perfumes... just everything you could ever imagine, and they literally were throwing the crap at you to try. One semi-buzz, a full tummy, and one hot flash later, we finally made it outta the place with two bottles of wine, a bottle of pineapple brown sugar vinagrette, and some pineapple white chocolate. It was... AWESOME!!

If any of you come here to visit, get your 5 bucks ready because you will definately be going here. And if you think it sucks... you didn't try enough of the wine. If you're not a wine-o, and you don't like pineapple... well, you suck and you can't hang out with me!