After our visit to the east coast, we were happy to be back at the warm beach of Saint George Island. We spent the week doing what we did at every beach: burying Little Kid, building sand castles, flying our kite, playing in the water, and running around like lunatics.

One day, when we were at the beach, somebody caught a huge shark. By huge, I mean eighty two inches long, 220 pounds! It was so cool. When the man who caught it was measuring it, the shark hit him with it’s tail fin. Awesome!

On our way to the beach, we saw some people with binoculars, and we stopped to ask what they were looking at. They said that there was an owl nest with babies. That explained the owl we kept hearing! Another day we came back with our own binoculars. The babies were so cute! They were just little white balls of fluff.

We also spent some time at the bay. The bay was beautiful, and the shallow water was fun to explore. We found lots of hermit crabs. Now, we are going to Atlanta.

We had a great time at St. Joseph Peninsula State Park, a beautiful peninsula in the Florida Panhandle. The beach was very pretty. One day, Little Kid made friends with a boy named Ben. The next day, Ben and I were digging tunnels and holes together. We built a huge tunnel, but when it was almost done, it collapsed. I spent a lot of my time playing in and working on a huge hole that everyone called “the hot tub”. Right before we left, I made a tunnel into the hot tub. It was super cool! Because it was cold, we spent a little time running in the water, but not that much.

One day, we were on the beach when we noticed a dolphin swimming just past the breaking waves. Soon, we started to wonder how it was going under, then appearing somewhere completely different a second later. We realized that it wasn’t one dolphin, but it was a whole pod. They were swimming around, slapping their fins, and jumping. It looked like they were playing!

Little Kid liked all the college boys on the beach. One day, there were a few college kids lying on the beach. Little Kid walked over, looked at them, then lay down next to them. It was very funny. Another day, Little Kid made friends with another college kid. The kid built a hole for Little Kid and ran back and forth, bringing water to the hole. Ma said, “you can help too, Jay,” and Little Kid said, “no, I like it this way.”

When we left St. Joe’s, we dropped the RV off at a storage place, brought Mr. Bear, my rabbit, to a boarding place, and then hopped in the car and headed towards Connecticut for my cousin’s bar mitzvah.

We all loved Saint Andrews State Park, near Panama City Beach. The campground was on a lagoon, and we went to the Gulf of Mexico beach every day. There was a huge sandy beach, and a jetty where Little Kid and I could wade without being knocked down by waves. The beach was so awesome that we had a picnic on it one night. When we were almost done eating, some seagulls noticed our food. We spent the rest of the time chasing away the seagulls. Little Kid ran around screaming and chasing the seagulls. He was probably very excited to see us going crazy. We were walking back to the car when Ma said, “There is something diving out there. ” I looked over and saw a fin come up. “Dolphin!” Ma and I yelled at the same time. We watched it come up and dive down until the dolphin disappeared in the fog. It was so peaceful, yet so amazing. The fog was so thick that it looked like a fairyland.

One day, we hiked down a little peninsula called Sandy Point. On the way, we met some very friendly deer. The first one was standing right on the edge of the trail. We walked right past her, but she didn’t move. A little later, we turned around and saw the same deer walking down the trail behind us. When we stopped, the deer came up to us sniffing around. More deer came, all very close to us. One actually touched my hand with it’s nose!

Another day at the beach, we found some steep dunes to jump off of. I made up a game where Ma threw the frisbee to me when I jumped off the dune, and I tried to catch it in mid-air. We played this game and other dune jumping games every time we went to the beach. One day, I met some kids, and we collected hermit crabs together. The biggest hermit crab was bold enough to pinch one of the kids!

When our nine days at Saint Andrews were over, we went to another beach called Saint Joseph.

After we left Long Key, we went to Curry Hammock for two days, before we came back to Long Key for another two days.

Curry Hammock was awesome. Like Long Key, there were no waves. The sites weren’t right on the water, but the beach was totally awesome. When we first got there, I found a little pond and built canal to connect the pond to the ocean. My canal turned in to a river, and about half an hour later the pond was completely dry. We spent the rest of the afternoon hanging at the huge sandy beach.

While we were at Curry Hammock, we saw a huge marine iguana. It was so cool! Later we learned that the marine iguana is an invasive species and is harming the Keys environment. The iguanas first got there when pet owners released their pet iguanas.

Of course, the next day we spent at the beach. We were having a great time until I was wading along in the water and suddenly I felt a sting on my ankle. I looked down and saw a Portuguese Man of War with its tentacle attached to me. I freaked out, thrashing around until it came off. Then I started screaming and wading to shore, where Ma drove me to the ranger station. The ranger was very calm, probably because it happened a lot, and poured some ammonia on the sting. Soon, I started feeling better. I spent the rest of the afternoon inside the RV with a hot compress on my ankle.

Portuguese Man O’ War are not jellyfish, or even an animal, but they are a collection of organisms working together like one animal. On the Portuguese Man O’ War, there are three kinds of tentacles. One type is for reproduction, another type is for eating, and the last ones are long and stinging.

Our two days back at Long Key were good. I caught a few slow fish in my net, and found a piece of something called rose coral. Little Kid and I went swimming a few times. I tried to give Little Kid some swimming lessons, but he was pretty uncooperative. The two days went by super fast, and then we left on our trek to the Florida Panhandle, with a few one night stops.

We spent two weeks at Long Key State Park, in the Florida Keys. The spot was super close to the beach, so we spent most of our time playing at the beach. The water was a beautiful teal and aqua that was calm as far as we could see. The sand there was very strange. In the water, it was very squishy, and when I walked on it, I sunk in. Another strange thing about the beach was that it was the Atlantic Ocean, but there were almost no waves. We think it may have been partly because the water was so shallow so far out. The water was so shallow that we could walk out almost three hundred feet without swimming. Actually, at low tide, you had to walk almost three hundred feet to get your ankles wet. That gives you an idea how shallow the water was and how dramatic the tides were.

One day in the Keys we spent at Key West. My favorite thing about Key West was that there were free-range chickens roaming around everywhere. We spent several hours walking around town. We went to the southern most point buoy, even though it is not a real buoy, it is a big concrete buoy on land, and the real southern most point is a spit of land behind it.

While we were in the Keys, Pa decided to buy a remote control glider. The day after he got it, Pa and I went to a large field to fly the glider. Soon enough, we learned some new things about flying it. The first thing we learned was to never fly the glider near trees. On the first flight, Pa flew the glider straight into a tree. After a spending almost fifteen minutes searching for branches to poke the glider out and climbing up the tree to try to get it, we decided to go to Home Depot. At Home Depot, we bought a sixteen foot long telescoping pole to poke the plane out of the tree. Somehow, even though the glider was made of foam, we managed to poke the glider out of the tree without destroying it. After that, we spent another hour or two flying it around.

On another day, Ma, Little Kid and I headed to No Name Key to see the Key Deer. The Key Deer are a type of deer that only live in the Keys. Key Deer were stranded when the Keys were formed. Because of the limited food, they became smaller. I saw the the first Key Deer when we were just driving along. We had to do a crazy u-turn to see it, but it was definitely worth it. The Key Deer was so tiny! It was about the size of a golden retriever. It just looked like a baby deer, but the male we saw was even better. It was the same size as the other Key Deer, but he had full size antlers. Cool! We saw ten or twenty more Key Deer before we left. One almost walked up to our car!

Another thing we did was two hours of kayaking. We rented a kayak, and Ma, Little Kid and I went off. We spent most of our time paddling along the mangrove covered shore. We paddled past a few beaches, all covered with ibis and herons. A few times we thought we had seen fishing floats, but they all turned out to be trash or sea foam. On the way back, I suddenly looked down and saw two mating horseshoe crabs. They were scuttling along the bottom really fast. We watched them for awhile before continuing on.

A few days before we left, we were lucky enough to get a spot at another park in the Keys, called Curry Hammock State Park. Now we are going there for two nights.