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.