Dry Tortugas - Redeux

For Taylor's last family vacation he requested that we go camping at Dry Tortugas National Park.  We did a day trip there during our Florida Keys vacation last year and just loved the place.  The only way to stay there overnight, however, is to camp.  I have been against tent camping for a while since it makes my back ache to sleep on the ground (yes, I am getting old), but that was the only way to do this destination so I packed the ibuprofen and made the best of things.

Gotta have a butter beer in Hogsmeade

The whole vacation got off to a weenie start when the Primary Program got changed to the first day of our planned vacation.  Since I am the Primary President, I can't very well miss that event so we had to pack in 2 days of driving into one day and night.  We were pretty tired when we arrived at Universal Orlando.  Taylor and the little guys were excited to be visiting Harry Potter world.  (They got to sleep all night...)  We skipped Disney since we had just been to Disney a few months ago.  The rest of Universal is just blah but Harry Potter land is absolutely AWESOME!  I definitely recommend spending 2 days to explore Diagnon Alley and Hogwarts/Hogsmeade.  It's a good thing we only spent 2 days there, they are experts at taking your money and making you happy to part with it...

After our brief stop in Orlando we drove to Key West and boarded the ferry with our camping gear to Dry Tortugas.  There was a slight breeze when we landed but the waves weren't too bad.  We managed to kayak around the island and do some snorkeling at some coral heads only accessible by kayak.  That night it began raining.  We ate our meal in the rain and then went directly to bed as sitting around the campfire in the steady rain is no fun.  The next day the waves were pretty big and the wind was blowing pretty hard.  No kayaking for us that day.  We explored the fort and jumped off the walls into the ocean.  This was our last night (or so we thought) so we took a walk around the wall at night with flashlights and saw all kinds of night time only fish, pretty cool.  Unfortunately, it was too cloudy to see the stars.  We were hoping the boys would get to see the Milky Way but no such luck.  The next day we were set to pack up and have our gear on the dock for loading in the ferry when the park ranger came to our tent and told us that the wind was blowing too hard and the waves were too high for the ferry to make the trip that day.  Hope you have enough food to last another day...

Yeah, apparently travel mayhem can happen on a camping trip as well.  We had some cliff bars and granola and one heater meal that we fed the boys.  The bright spot was that no one else was camping and since the ferry didn't come there weren't any day trippers either.  We had the whole island to ourselves.  We took over the whole place.  We left our stuff on the beach, inside the fort as well as at our campsite.  It was really fun playing hide and seek inside the fort and snorkeling without anyone else around to scare away the fish.  We made ourselves feel better about our predicament by discussing worse places to be stranded, London, Heathrow was agreed upon by all to be the worst place to be stuck

The crab pinched his palm just after the picture was taken

.  When we finally got back to the mainland Miriya had called 25 times and was very worried.  She was strangely unsympathetic when we explained our ordeal.  Something about not feeling bad about being stranded on an island...

Since we got back a day later than planned we again had to do the long drive home in one day.  Whew!