Long before we arrived in Florida, we planned to take a three-hour snorkeling trip to the reefs six miles out into the Atlantic. We've never snorkeled before, and it's been awhile since we actually *swam.* So when the tour company said, "Uh, we've got two foot waves and pretty choppy conditions, we're going to need experienced snorkelers and strong swimmers for this adventure," we said, "We'll take the boat!" Our snorkel trip was refunded and we booked an afternoon excursion to the reefs in a glass bottom boat (which is really more like windows built into the bottom, which you'll see in the pics).
The tricky part was that sometimes the park fills up, so once you're in, you should stay in or possibly not be allowed back in to take your tour (with the privately-owned company). We had: no towels, an almost empty bottle of sunblock, no food, no beach gear, no water--wait! we might have had water. We ended up tromping back and forth at this state park in Key Largo looking for the big beach (there was no big beach). Eventually, we claimed a small patch of cement hard sand on Cannon Beach. It is so named, due to the crazy amount of shipwrecks just off the coast. Had we brought goggles or a diving mask, we could have waded out to the buoy and seen such a wreck for ourselves.
But we did not have these things. And although we bought: towels, sunblock, food, sunglasses, and post cards in the gift shop--they only had child-size underwater gear left. Ha! take that gift shop; no more of our money for you!! (Lol--we funded Pennekamp park for at least the next three months with our unpreparedness :)
Our boating adventure was also three hours long. I can't even describe the vivid varieties of blue in the water. We took picture after picture trying to capture it, but it's one of those God's creation moments you just have to experience yourself! We mostly didn't have to wear masks on the boat. Florida mostly doesn't care if you wear a mask at all. Buck tried to come inside and see all the reefs and fish and sharks and other interesting life through the windows, but he gets motion sick and didn't want to push his Dramamine past its limits. To help combat general ocean motion sickness, the deckhands were handing out peppermints like candy ;) Caelan said she got like five, but wasn't going to turn down candy!
It was all very educational and interesting, and I'm glad that we chose this option instead of being IN the water. The kids had never been out on the ocean in a boat, so this was a new adventure for them :) And considering our preparedness (or lack thereof) and the amount of time we spent in the sun, we really didn't get that crispy!
Of course we wanted to see more of the keys than just Key Largo, so after our boat trip we started driving south. I showed the kids a live map of where we were . . . disconnected from the continental United States, except for a crazy long highway that connects the Keys over long stretches of water.
According to the Internets there are 800 keys in Florida! We certainly did not see all of them, but we did drive through the middle of a few. I would say, if you didn't know you were on a tiny island, from the main road, it looks like pretty much any other town with palm trees. I think we would have really needed to keep driving to the very end to see some of the quaint towns that I'd looked up ahead of time.
One place we did go to intentionally was Islamorada. Kristin recommended a restaurant called MEAT that serves homemade sodas. It was seriously the best burger and fries I've had in maybe forever! There was a giant elk head above our table, wearing a covid mask. It was a tiny little place, but wow was that delicious food! It was also our most expensive meal of the entire vacation, because everyone ordered sodas, floats, or shakes with their meal. Good thing we had our grocery budget to spend!
After dinner, we drove around long enough to try to catch the sunset. We weren't exactly sure where to stop and watch this occur, but we found a park in Key Largo that was so beautiful! I think we were supposed to pay half a million dollars to drive into it, but no one was at the booth or the backup pay station, and we were only there long enough to take a few pictures and watch the sun disappear into the water (well, behind a little stretch of land, and then assumedly into the water :) Of course, the boys took the opportunity to play football (it was hard to play on the tiny Cannon Beach earlier--more of a handoff, like in track relays).
Did you catch Caelan's photo bomb? Lol!
1 comment:
Those beach pictures are beautiful!
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