Day 148: More of the same for another week.

When I told Marlene that I wanted to spend 4 weeks in the keys, she looked at me as if I was nuts. Our last visit to Florida, we spent an entire month in the state meandering along its entire coast line. To think that we are going to spend the same amount of time but only in these little islands south of Miami, she thought we would for sure be sick of it before too long.

There are actually plenty of things to do here in the keys. Fishing, boating, enjoying the nightlife are all part of the Florida keys lifestyle. The only problem is that we are not doing any of those things. We aren’t big into fishing, boating around here is a little pricey and a nightlife? Are you kidding me? We haven’t had a nightlife to speak of for almost 6 years. We are lucky if we get to sit down and watch a TV show after we put all the kids to bed.

What I really have been looking forward to is exactly what we have been doing. Nothing. We are not trying to cram a bunch of activities into a day like we do during short visits in a big city. We wanted to slow things way down and just enjoy ourselves. We are also making lots of meals in versus going out to eat once or twice a day like we have been doing for the last 5 months. We will probably get back into that mode of traveling after we leave here but until then, we are content with taking things slow.

After a couple of nights here, we did find out that we are indeed dealing with a bit more bugs here than we had in Long Key. When we left Bahia Honda we stopped at the K-Mart in Marathon. I had wanted to buy an electric bug zapper to minimize the mosquitoes. We decided against it since Long Key was so pleasant and we never needed it.

Since Curry Hammock is only a couple of miles up from the K-Mart, I decided to take a drive there today to pick one up to help keep the mosquito population under control.

The daily routine here basically involves waking up, make breakfast, take the kids to the playground and relax. Luka is getting into the ‘swing’ of things.

Sometimes people wonder about how our kids make and keep friends when we travel. The truth is that it is kind of tough. They have friends at home but they haven’t seen them in months. When you are only 5 years old, being gone for 6 months is 10% of your life.

I can say one thing though about what we have observed of our 2 girls. They are much better at meeting and interacting with new kids than they ever were before. They are open to meeting and talking to new people much more willingly and have lost a lot of the shyness that they exhibited prior to the trips.

We encourage them to go up and talk to kids at the playground and just to introduce themselves and ask if they want to play with them. Of course, Ava introduced these boys to her favorite new game here at Curry Hammock, running and jumping off the sand berms.

Just like I imagined in my mind, sooner or later someone was going to twist an ankle. Poor Ava became the victim of my intuition.

Don’t worry little ones, your big sister is going to be ok. I am sure she will be back to her old shenanigans in no time.

over and out,
dan