A Week in the Florida Keys

Once again, we had the pleasure of staying a week in the Florida Keys this summer. Mom and Dad rented a great house on a canal and we had a great time relaxing and running around being tourists. The canal was great because it was perfect for fishing. We spent quite a few hours out there on the dock catching fish and the kids reeled in quite a few with their Barbie and Spongebob poles.

Mom and dad celebrated their thirty nineth wedding anniversary while we were in the keys. We surprised them on Sunday night with a little skit put on by the grandkids. Samantha was the nararator, Brooke played the role of "Pamela" and Leann was "Roger" (complete with eyeliner moustache.. what a sport!). Sam read the modified story of how mom and dad met and fell in love and the girls acted it out. It was really cute. I got it on video, but the file is way to large to share on here. Afterwards we celebrated with cake!

One cool new thing we did this year was a conoe trip through the mangroves at Long Key State Park. We rented a few conoes there and they have markers in the water that you conoe to and read the corresponding guide points on the map. We got to see a lot of cool oceanlife, like anenomes, horshoe crab, starfish, birds, and the other canoers even saw some sharks!

The best part about visiting the keys is of course Jeff and Laura. The kids have a blast with them and take every oportunity to tackle Uncle Jeff. Here is a picture of Jeff holding three of his nieces at once (Leann is hidden behind Ali).

Steve's friend Frank, who has a house in the keys, was visiting at the same time as us, so Steve got to go spend a fun day of fishing with him. I had to drive him to Big Pine Key that morning (very very early) but got to catch this sunrise on the Seven Mile bridge which was so beautiful!

The rest of us went to Hawks Cay, where Jeff works, to visit with the dolphins. Some of us got to go out on the docks with him to do a meet and greet with the dolphins. This usually includes feeding them, petting them, watching them do tricks, and basically ooo-ing and ahh-ing over Jeffrey and all he's learned! Steph and I both end up in tears whenever we watch him at work. We are so proud of our little brother and all he's achieved. This picture is pretty fuzzy, but it's the best one I have to share until I raid mom's camera.



Check out my silly girls and their fish lips! Notice the super-fashionable Dolphin Connection t-shirts, a gift from Uncle Jeff.


After our time with the dolphins, we headed over to the Hawk's Cay splash park. It's a pirate ship with water guns, slides, and more.. very fun for the kids! When we got there I saw a giant checkers set laid out and was so excited! Excited over checkers, you say? Brooke has really gotten into checkers lately. She plays checkers on our checkers board at home, in Webkinz world, and on our iphones and I must say, she's pretty good! So Papa challenged her to a game. It was a looong game. Neither one of them were giving in.. Papa asked a few times if she wanted to call it a tie, and she refused. She's very persistent! Finally, after enough back and forth, she agreed to shake his hand and call it a tie. It was so fun to watch her!

Here's a cute shot of the two little ones playing with the giant chess set.

And some shots of the girls playing at the splash park.

That evening, the girls and I drove over to Big Pine to meet Steve and Frank for dinner at the No Name Pub. This is now my favorite place to eat in the keys. The food was great! The walls are covered in dollar bills that customers have decorated and stapled to the wall. The girls had fun decorating their dollars and finding the perfect spot to hang them. One the way back to Marathon, the sun was setting so we pulled over at the Seven Mile Bridge just to take it all in. Sunsets in the keys are the best.

The next day it was time to pack up and head home. But not without first making a stop at one our favorite Keys tourist traps, Robbie's Marina! Robbie's is a fun place where you can feed giant tarpon, right off the docks. We've done this a few years now and it's just so much fun to watch these giant fish jump out of the water to grab your bait. Steve is much more brave than I am and will dangle his whole arm over the dock. I prefer to go sissy-style and toss from a distance. We got some great video that I'll post in a seperate blog post, but here are a few pictures.

And of course it would't be a trip to the keys for me without getting the famous key lime bar on a stick. These are TO DIE FOR! In fact I love them so much that my sweet husband has ordered them and had them shipped to our house as gifts on two occasions. This trip I had four! The other great thing about the key lime bar is that no one in my immediate family likes them, so I never have to share!!!
So another Keys trip is in the past. We'll be heading back down there in March of 2010 to watch my baby brother get married. Jeff and Laura would like to move north in the near future, so the keys trip might becaome a thing of the past. I guess Steve will have to order me a box of key lime bars every summer just so I can remember how much I will miss the keys!