Let me back up and just say that on occasion I have to be talked into doing things like riding a wave runner. I am not like the rest of my family who asks the cute cabana boy things like, 'How fast are we allowed to go?' My family knows this about me so by the time I arrived at the rental center the cute cabana boy let me know that my family was not going to allow me to drive. Apparently they did not want me slowing them down. My daughter1 would drive and I would be her passenger. Which was fine with me because I have been on the back of a wave runner with my hubs before and told the cute cabana boy that he was the one they should be worried about. I think cute cabana boy had already figured this out.
This is cute cabana boy. He looked a lot like Chris O'Donnell...
I was distracted by our upcoming adventure so I neglected to hit the zoom. Plus my girls would have found that embarrassing and I'm pretty sure mom on the wave runner was embarrassment enough for one day.
We all put on the very attractive life jackets and I'd been wearing a baseball cap all morning on the beach but had to stow it because apparently we were going to go fast...nothing like some lovely hat hair to complete my look. Why don't I look adorable in my life jacket like daughter2?
Cute cabana boy gave us the basic operating instructions but the only thing I really heard was to leave a lot of space between the wave runners in case someone stops suddenly and also the part about if you go flying off to move away from the wave runner so your hair and/or life jacket are not sucked up underneath the machine. Won't this be fun?
In fact it was lots of fun. Lots and lots of fun. Actually, while I generally have to be pep talked into stuff I do love to go fast. Daughter1 was an excellent driver and hubs only scared daughter2 once or twice. He liked to drop way way behind us so he could then zoom up at supersonic speed. Cute cabana boy pretended he didn't notice.
In all our trips to Marco we'd never been out to the islands. Technically you don't go to the islands, you ride around them. There are mangroves on these islands and they are interesting trees. They grow in salt water and the roots go as deep as the trees are tall. They are able to filter the salt water themselves and the mangrove forests along the coastline here help protect Marco from storm surges and hurricanes.
We didn't see any manatees but we did see lots of beautiful birds and some crazy jumping fish and we got up close and personal with some dolphins...he's right beside us here-
It's not easy to take a picture of a moving animal while sitting on a bobbing wave runner in the Gulf but we tried...
We rode for about an hour and a half and only saw a handful of boats in all that time. It felt like we were the only people on the water and it was a gorgeous day.
I may have needed a little coaxing to get started but by the time we returned to the beach I was thinking maybe we needed to buy a wave runner once we got back home. And I guess a house on the Gulf to go with it...I mean we'd have to park it somewhere right?
