my most perfect Sunday Funday ever

You know those days you want to bottle up and remember forever? Where you can’t seem take enough photos to capture the absolute amazement of the day and you want to replay it over and over in your mind? Well that day for me was day three of our Key West vacation from the beautiful weather to the laughing to the storytelling to the views of the islands.

After asking me what my friends and I wanted to do on our vacation, my cousin and her friend took us out in the Gulf for a day of sun, boating, fishing and snorkeling around in their favorite spots

We started off by fishing at first but it was proving to be a bad spot chosen by our "tour guide," so we headed over to the reef to spend some time snorkeling before trying to catch dinner again later.

Sidenote: This was my first real time snorkeling out in depths where a shark could have me breakfast.

Ready to swim with the sharks

Since I was with two locals, I threw caution to the wind and jumped in the water like I was Michael Phelps, quickly realizing that I better put on a life jacket for good measure to make sure I made it back to the boat alive. After all, I’m not THAT great of a swimmer. We probably spent a good forty minutes swimming around this reef where I was up close and personal with yellow tail and a few HUGE parrot fish where even a barracuda was getting a little too close for comfort at times. Eeek!

Let's see some fish

We drove further away from Key West and after trying two spots, we hit a gold mine where we (me included) caught a few yellowtail, a 15 pound grouper and even a shark on accident. Who knew we would all rock at fishing?!

I caught dinner; jaws sighting; grouper for dinner; Lissa and Melissa rocking the fishing poles

To finish off our Gulf tour, we anchored on a deserted island where the water was the perfect mix of blue and turquoise where we sipped coronas in the middle of the ocean. The next hour was absolutely amazing and this where my description just won’t do the experience justice.

You know when you look around and think, “How am I even doing this right now?” That’s it. That’s what I did the whole time. There was nothing around us – just white sand, a few other boaters and us laughing and in total awe of how perfectly awesome our Sunday Funday turned out as we looked out into the endless ocean as the sun set.

just a little deserted island for our happy hour

We ended the day grilling our hard work complete with lobster to end a truly magical day out in the waters of Key West.

To close out our vacation, we slowed things down a bit and rented bikes to tour the island to see Hemingway’s house and the Southernmost point and finally eat brunch at Blue Heaven. Several people recommended we hit this spot where the roosters walked freely and there was a reggae band for live music. Just a typical Monday….

best $15 of the trip

Southern most point

The afternoon concluded with more pool and mojito time and we watched the sun set along with at least a 100 other people for sunset celebration right off the Westin’s deck bar before eating our final dinner at Alonzo’s Oyster House for crab legs, wine and our final slice of key lime pie.

Sunset celebration at Mallory Square

To say we enjoyed ourselves is an incredible understatement. This vacation is one of those that completely exceeded my expectations where we didn’t really have a set of a schedule but knew we wanted it to be laid back and filled with lots of laughs and stories to wrap up the summer of 2012

From our unofficial theme song from the vacation and as Eddie Money said, can we go back and do it all over again?