Epic East Coast - Day 26

Alex
Today we went to the turtle hospital. So we drove to the hospital. It took about 1h to get there. When we got there we went into the gift shop to talk with the person there. At 10:00am we started our tour. We first saw some green turtles. After we saw some baby turtles. They were less than one foot long!

After we went to a sea food place and got lunch. Then we went to the beach. I built a big sand castle but it got destroyed by the high tide. Which was just big waves that knock you off your feet!

Later we got some ice cream. Mom got some chocolate covered lime pie and Dad got lime pie at Key West lime pie place.

Evan
Well, I'm back with day 26. First we drove to The Turtle Hospital in Marathon. Then we went to a brutus seafood restaurant for lunch. Then we went back to Key West and went to the beach.

Bradley
ice cream turtle hospital beach

(those are the things Bradley liked today - and he typed them himself)

Jonathan
I liked the Turtle Hospital because I got to feed sea turtles.  Also, I got to see baby sea turtles.  We got to go in the water at the beach.  Next I had ice cream!

Jason

We started off the day a bit early, as we had an hour long drive to Marathon for a 10:00am reservation for a tour of the sea turtle rescue hospital.  It is a former motel that had a tide pool that the owner filled with fish for his guests.  Around the time of TMNT, little kids started asking him where the turtles were, so he did some research and discovered that you couldn't own turtles, as they were endangered, but the area did need a turtle rescue hospital, so he turned the motel into a motel / turtle hospital.  In 2005, hurricane Wilma flooded out the area, the motel was shut down and the entire place was turned into a hospital for turtles.

The tour started with a presentation on the hospital and sea turtles, before moving on to the tanks where the turtles live while they are rehabilitated.  The first two big tanks were full of green turtles, and they were very cool to see, as they swam around and ate food pellets right in front of you.  Jonathan especially loved one called Leonardo that kept surfacing right in front of him.  The second tank was full of "bubble-butts".  Various things can damage sea turtle shells, causing the shell to actually grow around an air pocket.  This makes the turtle too buoyant to dive and in some cases makes it difficult for them to get their heads out of the water.  They try to help the turtles out by attaching lead weights to them, but for the most part these turtles end up permanently out of the ocean.  (I believe that all the permanent residents of the hospital - housed in the original tide pool - are turtles with this condition.)

The final area was turtles that were in isolation, the hatchings and the permanent residents, which we all got to feed.  Jonathan really loved the hatchlings and feeding the turtles, though he did not like the one recent isolation turtle, which had a broken shell due to a propeller strike.  After the tour was over, we headed to a local sea food restaurant for lunch.  Sandra and I shared a conch platter and a fried fresh mahi.  The fish was really good, but the conch was a bit on the chewy side.

Before returning to Key West, we stopped at a state park on the way, so that the kids could play in the water.  According to the entrance sign, the water was 30C, which is crazy hot.  This beach featured waves, and the kids loved it.  They spent the entire afternoon splashing in the water and, as we later found out, getting sunburnt.  With the wind coming in off the ocean it was cool, and we didn't realize until we left how red everyone was.

After supper we took a quick drive out to the tourist part of town so that Sandra could go shopping at a shell store before we took the kids for ice cream.  The two of us then tried key lime pie - I had a regular piece, while Sandra ate a piece that was chocolate covered and stuck on a stick.  It was then back to the condo to get everyone calmed down, covered in aloe, and put to bed.