The One Where I Question Our Sanity and Whine Like a Baby

2010-11-11

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When a tour company approaches you as you board their boat offering the chance to back out with a full refund, a normal person would heed the warning, take the money and run.

But we aren’t normal. Because we have a quest to visit every national park during our married life together. And this quest brought us all the way down to Key West. And we didn’t drive all the way down to Key West only to turn around and head 100 miles north without first taking a boat 70 nautical miles further west to Dry Tortugas National Park.

So, we boarded the boat with our crew of lil ones, quickly bought some Dramamine and off we set for the Dry Tortugas!

The first hour was nice. We ate breakfast, the kids met the Captain, did a little coloring… then, our 3 yr complained of her belly hurting. We quickly got our supply of “bags” ready and spent the next hour losing our breakfasts. The girls fell first. With the 4 yr old having it the worst, followed closely by her Momma. By the time we reached the island we were both covered in her puke. The only one who was spared the misery was our 6 yr old. Even our baby fell victim to the sea. Scott held out pretty long, and truthfully, I think he was sick more from watching, smelling, and wearing all of our puke, than he did from actual sea sickness.

Ya know how on TV whenever they show women in labor, they show them angry and screaming? Well, I am not one to scream in labor. But, when sea sick, that is a whole other story… Pretty much all I said during that hour was, “I’m sorry and thank you” to the incredible boat crew who kept helping us clean up and “We are IDIOTS… what were we thinking?” to poor Scott as we did our best to hold barf bags for our kids, hold our kids, and puke into bags of our own. This picture was actually taken on the way home… when, with more favorable seas and a more timely dose of Dramamine, the kids slept and all 6 enjoyed a nice boat ride without feeling sick!

It was just as horrible as you might think and I wondered if the island could possibly come close to being worth the trek out there.

Finally when we reached the boundaries of the park with the island in sight, our stomachs settled and we got a view of the paradise awaiting us.

Ft Jefferson was built on the Dry Tortugas in the 1800s to defend our trade routes from Britain. Words can’t even describe how enormous it was and it truly blows my mind to think of how they got those bricks all the way out there and built it. Here is a view of the inside of the fort. They said you could fit all of Yankee Stadium in here. It is massive! And our son loved the fact that each “window’’ was intended for a cannon.

A moat surrounds the entire fort. We enjoyed our walk around it looking for wildlife swimming inside of the moat.

We also enjoyed walking around the halls of the fort as well as the view from the top.

We chose to eat our lunch at a picnic table by the shore. Afterwards the kids enjoyed playing on the beach. The water and adjacent islands were beautiful! One island aptly named “bird island” had a cloud of constantly swarming birds going though there annual matting dance.