Tropics and Sandcastles

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Today I slept in late. It was a very tiring drive the day before from Washington D.C. and I really needed the sleep. We had planned to go visit Key West the night before, but instead decided to postpone it a day because we were all so knackered.

I went to the beach but on my way bought some sunglasses as the sun was causing getting in my eyes.
We found a good spot on the beach which wasn't as busy as the day before.
I swam in the sea for about an hour or two before the sun disappeared behind the clouds, the water was also slightly colder than the day before but was very comfortable to swim in.
I lay on the beach and just relaxed for a while when Ace, Tom and Jenny arrived.
I decided to try and build a castle so started digging a lot of sand. It was hard work, so after a while I decided to go back into the sea. It was cooler than the previous day also at only 24C.
The sea was really nice even though the sun wasn't out at all.

We planned to build a sandcastle and began drawing outlines for a moat with a large space of sand in the middle for building a castle. We began digging the moat and a Colombian person came over offering to help.
I thought it would be a great opportunity to practice speaking Spanish so started talking to him in Spanish.
We build the castle for a good 2-3 hours before he offered to buy us all some beer. He walked away while we all continued to built the sandcastle and brought us 6 cool coronas from the nearest shop.
We took some photographs and then tried to finish our sandcastle.

We had tourists walking past asking us if they could take pictures of it which was quite flattering, but we had spent a long time building the castle.
We had finished the castle just before the sunset and it looked a little like Aztec ruins or something.
We watched the pelicans dive into the water for fish and a cruise liner sail off from the beach as the sunset gave the sky some orange, red and purple colours.
After asking people to take photographs of us beside our castle, and having many people compliment us from the long job, we left to return back to the hotel with the heated swimming pool.

We were about to go for a swim, when we realised the pool wasn't that hot at all. It began to rain so we decided to see if we could find a hot tub, and sure enough we found a hotel with a heated outdoor swimming pool and jacuzzi. It was really nice sitting at the end of the day with a long day under the sun to relax in the jacuzzi. I then went for a swim in the pool and headed back to the hotel.

Since the food was so expensive the night before, we opted to go to a reasonably priced Japanese sushi restaurant. We sat in an unusual Asian-styled booth and ate sushi and ramen.

After eating, we visited our sandcastle once more to discover it smothered in water as the tide had come in.
We returned to the hotel and I discovered I had been burnt all over despite wearing sun cream and despite the fact it was really cloud and the sun was rarely out.

We just slept soon after to wake up early for visiting Florida's Keys.

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