A Tropical Thanksgiving - Better Late Than Never

This year for Thanksgiving, Mindy, Jeran, and I planned a dive/snorkel trip down to south Florida.  For some reason we thought it would be more fun to surprise you all with pictures from our tropical vacation instead of telling you our awesome plans... I'm not even sure why we did it that way, and I think it was my idea.

Florida sunset over the ocean - I'll never get tired of them

Anyhoo, I ended up having to work on Wednesday, so I flew down to Ft. Lauderdale that evening where M&J picked me up, they having departed from North Carolina the day before. We made it down to Key Largo latish that night and went to bed.

Thursday - Jeran woke us up early, and we ate breakfast before going to the dive shop, Silent World. We signed waivers, etc, and went to meet their boat at the dock. We were in a group with four other divers as well.  The first dive was excellent for me, but not so much for M&J.  I was enthralled by the very close-up coral, cool fishes, the moon jellyfish, and the fact that I could snorkel without choking on "icky-bicky water" every two minutes (it was closer to every ten minutes). According to the divers, however, the coral and fishes were rather common and the water was very murky and cold.  We did see the famous "Christ of the Abyss" statue though, which is famous.

I snorkel! Also, breaking the air bubbles from divers is kinda fun.

 The next dive was better - much higher visibility and warmer water. The ocean floor wasn't quite so near to me, so I didn't get to examine the coral so closely, but the City of Washington wreckage and the schools of big barracuda fishes made up for it.

City of Washington wreckage

That afternoon we came back to the resort (a little place called Rock Reef Inn) and got ready for Thanksgiving dinner with the owners and all their guests. It was...interesting. The rule for dinner was that you couldn't sit by anyone you knew, especially not your spouse, so Mindy ended up sitting on the opposite side of the room from me and (sitting kitty-corner to me) Jeran. I especially liked the homemade key lime pie.

 Friday - Awesome snorkeling! It was just us three on the boat, so the captain took us back out to the elbow reef where the second dive had been. We did two dives right near the same area as the City of Washington. This was the highlight of the trip for me - we had seen some sea turtles from the boat, so we were hoping to see some once we got in the water. I ended up seeing six sea turtles that day! (Well, at least four different turtles on a total of six occasions). I even got to swim along side one for a good ways, ending when it chomped up a jellyfish then turned and looked at me. 

Face off with a turtle - I had to remember not to reach out and
\touch it  (push it away)  because it was so close to me!

This is when snorkeling was better than diving, because Mindy and Jeran saw only two sea turtles instead of the six I saw. And then there were my two sharks - a small reef shark and a nurse shark. It was surreal to see them swim along the ocean floor and think that I was so close to a shark! I didn't have a camera, but this is what they looked like:

It's really hard to describe the experience of snorkeling (and I would assume, scuba diving). You get to peek into a world that you've only ever seen in aquariums, but it's so much more vibrant and alive. The current of the ocean pushes and pulls you constantly, and the coral is constantly swaying back and forth in it. There's no such thing as a moment when nothing is moving.

Saturday - We had planned to drive north along the coast to Jupiter where Mindy and Jeran would do another dive and I would hang out at the beach or something. But the dive shop there called and cancelled because it was too windy. So we ended up going to the Miami zoo instead. It was really quite a large zoo. I finally saw a koala! It was sleeping, so it just looked like a gray ball of fur (not food!).

Then on Sunday we drove back to Atlanta, entertained by Jeran's new game of "create movie plots from this title and main actor/actress." We should probably quite our jobs and become movie writers.