Reflections of My Travel

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This was our first morning of waking up at 0200 to start working. It was easier than I though it would be (probably because we haven’t slept later than 0300 yet). And it was nice because we were working the same time as the guys back at the office. And it was good and quiet around here. I didn’t even get terribly sleepy, no more than the sleepy spells that hit me every day at the office anyhow. When they hit, I got up and walked around the room till I woke back up. We have some mini wheats and apple sauce and such to snack on so we waited until after work to get something to eat. We probably won’t do that again tomorrow. I was starving by 1030. We walked to get something to eat (factoid: “deluxe local breakfast” = eggs, rice, and Spam® at McDonald’s – mmmmmspam {ick}) and then came back and took an hour nap. Then we got all of our snorkel stuff together and headed to Black Rock beach. Snorkeling is awesome! There were some pretty good waves breaking right at the shoreline that knocked me over a few times (yes, I did bring half the beach back in my bathing suit) but once we got about 15-20 feet out in the water, it was relatively calm. The undulation of the water took some getting used to and made picture taking much more difficult than it was in the nice calm Lake Wedowee (must learn manual focus!). We weren’t in the water 2 minutes when a great big sea turtle swam under us! It was beautiful. I followed it around a bit and it swam right up in front of me, maybe five feet, it surfaced and swam back down right in front of me. It was so exciting. I tried to get a little movie clip on my camera, but really I need to master still shots before I can hope to get a good movie clip underwater. When the turtle swam away, I started looking at all of the fish. They were very pretty. But they’re fast little buggers. Probably saw about 15 different kinds of fish. And the coral was very pretty too. Saw some urchins and anemones on the coral. It was all very surreal to me. After about an hour, while out there looking at coral, it occurred to me that I was beginning to feel very sick. I had been warned against drinking the salt water because it would make you sick so I had been very careful to not swallow any. I’m guessing it was all the undulating and maybe even trying to look through the camera while undulating. In any case, I felt awful and I got Randal’s attention to start heading back in. On the way back to shore, ANOTHER TURTLE! I was so excited, I forgot about being sick and watched it swim around beneath us for a bit. When it swam off, I remembered how I felt and finished swimming in. It was such a great experience. We sat on the beach for a while enjoying the scenery before heading back to the hotel to shower the salt off of us. We went walking to find some dinner as the sun was setting. When we got back at almost 1900, we went to bed.