My Vacation to Key West, Florida

I’ve played soccer ever since I was 4 years old. Since the age of 10 I have played on a traveling club team. When we were younger we wouldn’t travel so far away for tournaments. We would stay within about 2 or 3 hours away from home at the most. As we grew older we started to travel more and more and go to tournaments further away. The last four years of my club career we went to a tournament down in Miami, Florida called the Orange Classic. Since the tournament started two days after Christmas and ended a couple days before New Years we decided it would be fun for all of us to go down to Key West for New Years after the tournament was over. That was the best idea anyone could have had. Not only did us kids have a blast but I think our parents had more fun than we did. Almost everyone on my team had been together since we were 12 years old so we all were best friends and our parents had become really close as well.
The first year we went down to Key West we didn’t know what to expect. There were about thirty of us and we rented out these little condos by the water way. We were so cramped in all of our houses which made it even more fun. I had to sleep on the couch in the living room of one little condo and one of my friends had to sleep on the mattress on the floor next to me. That didn’t matter to us though. We were so happy just to be down there with everyone. It was December but unlike in Tennessee it was warm. It was mostly temperatures in the range of the high 70’s to low 80’s. We were all so happy to lay out and get tan over Christmas break while all of our friends back at home were pale and freezing.
Our parents were by far the best entertainment we had down there. First of all our parents aren’t the normal parents. They can get pretty out of control and there were many times where us kids had to take care of our parents. We would all go down to Key West and walk around while our parents would go “bar hopping”. We would all meet up at the end of the night to go home and our parents would barely be able to walk down the road so we would have to drive them home. They were quite the entertainment.
For the actual New Years Eve we would just stay within our condos and shoot off fireworks. At the place we were staying there was a dock out in the water about 15 yards and some of the dads thought it would be a good idea to go out there and shoot fireworks off of it. Well it didn’t turn out to be as good of an idea as they thought it would be. Since the dock was about as big as the beds of two small pick-up trucks put together, there was not enough room for about 10 dads and all the boxes of fireworks that they bought. Waded through the water out to the dock and started shooting the fireworks off. They were so close to the sparks that they had to jump off the dock so they wouldn’t get burned. That was the most entertaining fireworks show I’ve ever seen.
One thing we did on this trip that I had never done before was go snorkeling out in the ocean. We were so excited about getting to do this but it ended up not being as fun as we thought it would be. All but two of us got so sea sick we were throwing up off the boat. It was the worst snorkeling experience I’ve ever had. There were little jellyfish all in the water so every time you would move you would get stung. It was horrible. All of us wanted to go home but they wouldn’t let us because there were divers with us and of course they weren’t getting sick so we had to wait for them to be finished before we could leave. I did learn that I definitely need to take sea sickness medicine before I go out on an adventure like that again.
Basically this trip was one big party especially for the parents but it was a blast for the kids too. It was filled with a ton of memorable moments that I’ll keep with me for the rest of my life.