The Day I Begged Ben to Pee on my Leg.

Yep.  It's true.  I'll get to it in a moment.  It was truly gross, but truly necessary.

So on our fourth day in Key Caulker, we decided to just snorkel around the island some more.  The Mayan ruins excursion had really kicked our butts, so we were in the mood to just hang around and swim a little.

When Ben and I woke up, we went outside to our bikes, put our seats into the little seat slots (we had to take our seats inside every night), and realized that the gadget that you use to adjust your bike seat up and down was stolen off Ben's bike.  Sheesh.  So we went back to Chinatown Market and bought a brand-new gadget, because without being able to adjust the seat up, Ben's knees were up around his ears on that bike.  And, as we've learned in a previous post, they wouldn't just replace the part. We were buying brand-new bike parts for these people.  We started to wonder if the relatives of the people at Chinatown Market were the ones stealing our bike parts so that they could make extra money.

Seriously.  The night before this happened, we went out onto our front porch to hang up some laundry and to read, and this Chinese guy comes out from underneath us.  We were a little startled at first, but then he was like, "Hey, I was just looking to see if someone was in the office.  My family is looking for a place to stay.  Do you know where the owners of this place live?"  We gave him directions, and he walked away, but he didn't have a suitcase or a bag or a backpack, or any family of which he was speaking...looking back, it was suspicious.

Anywho, so we went and got a dang gadget for Ben's bike, and then we set off for a little cafe that Nick and Kathleen just looooved, called Amore Y Cafe.  Then we headed over to Nick and Kathleen's place.  Do you want me to show you the road to their house?  Well, okay, if you insist.

A sign you see on the road:

The slogan in Key Caulker is "Go Slow."  You see it everywhere.  Not necessarily to mean "go slow when driving golf carts on the island," (even though they do advocate for that) but more, "Take it easy.  Why hurry?  Relax."

This is one of the cemeteries you see:

I thought it was interesting that the graves are all above ground.

This is the school on the island.  I feel bad the kids have to just play in dust for recess:

 This is a Rastafarian church that has fun signs and pretty plants all around it:

The island seemed very religious.  Lots of Evangelicals, Rastafarians, and Jehovah's Witnesses.

After we dropped some stuff off at Nick and Kathleen's place, we headed to the west side of the island to do some snorkeling.  Ah, but first, a choice picture of Nick:

Ben took it with his underwater camera, which makes it bend weird on the edges, and he also had his red light filter cap thing on.  (You're only supposed to use that when you are farther than 10 feet underwater,)  It's also a choice picture because Nick pulled his jammies way up over his belly button and posed.  He's so funny.  Sometimes I think he and Ben are the same person.  Nick wears jammies when he's snorkeling sometimes, to protect his legs from getting burnt.  Which is a seriously good idea.

It was pretty silty, but we saw some neat stuff, including the school of tarpon we had been feeding a few days before.  These guys are HUGE.  It was a little intimidating swimming next to them.  Here's the best video Ben got of them:

Oh, and in the above video, you'll see Ben dive down to this hole.  It has a cable that goes all the way down there, but Ben couldn't hold his breath that long.

The water was smooth during this time, and we really enjoyed ourselves.

We stopped for lunch in town, but I decided I had to have some coconut milk first:

I had some coconut milk from one of the coconuts that's brown and fuzzy when Ben and I were on our honeymoon and visited Cozumel.  And I remember how absolutely amazing it tasted.  This did not taste nearly as good.  Maybe because it was from a different kind of coconut??  Or is this what coconuts look like before they turn round and fuzzy???  I have no idea.  I wish I hadn't drunk that stuff, though.

And do you like my hat?  When Ben and I were walking around one day and I was wearing that hat, a Rasta guy yelled, "Hey, are you two from Sweden?"  We must have looked like it, with Ben's tall, blonde brawn and my floppy hat. :)

We stopped at some random restaurant.  Ben and Nick got the ceviche and Kathleen and I got the pizza.  And we regretted that.  I think the boys liked the ceviche fine, but the pizza was meh.  This orange cat kept standing next to our table and staring at us forlornly.  Nick would give him pieces of shrimp.  Kathleen and I tried feeding him pizza, and he was very snobbish about it.  He wouldn't touch the pizza.  He wanted the seafood.

Animals on this island are really funny.  They all have collars, but they kind of...roam free.  And many of them seem deeply, deeply depressed.  I don't know what they have to be depressed about.  What's the problem?  Plenty of tourists to mooch food from...a carefree life where you can run around all day, unimpeded...Maybe the weather is too hot for them??  Maybe that's the issue.

So then we decided to go to the south of the island.  There is this old fishing shack about 1/4 mile out or so: 

We wanted to head out there. 

Again, not a ton to see, but starfish here and there, needlefish here and there...  And the wind had picked up, as well as the current.  You had to really fight to get to where you wanted to go.  I'm really glad we made it to the old fishing shack, though, because underneath there were thousands of fish, including a really spectacular lion fish.  Ben took a really great video of it, but for some reason it won't load.  Huge bummer.

Despite having liberally applied sunscreen, my back had gotten crispy-burnt during our morning snorkeling adventure, so I wore a t-shirt while snorkeling the second half of the day, which was smart of me.

I started to get seriously seasick out there, so I told Ben I needed to get onto dry land, and I made a beeline for the dock at the shore.  The others explored a mangrove before heading in.  The current was crazy.  I would swim a few strokes, and then peek up and realize that I was pointed into the current instead of toward the shore.  So I would right myself, swim a few more strokes, peek up, and realize that I was pointed into the current.  That was weird.  I had to keep correcting myself. 

At some point on the way to the dock, I got stung by something.  I didn't see it, but I have a suspicion that it was one of these little guys:

I started to feel the stinging right before I climbed the little ladder to get up onto the dock.  It was on the right side of my right thigh.  It felt like millions of little needles poking me, over and over and over.  And I was sooooo seasick. 

After the others got out of the water, we walked the short distance to Nick and Kathleen's place, and I lay down on their floor to try to feel less nauseated.  Kathleen had some neosporin, and we put it on the stinging place on my leg, but it didn't seem to help.  She had some anti-nausea pills, though, and those helped a ton with my motion sickness.  Nick whipped up some virgin pina coladas, and those tasted good. 

The stinging felt like it was getting worse and worse, and then I remembered something I saw on Friends.  Something about, if you have a jellyfish sting, the properties in pee can take the sting away.  I'm unable to embed, but you can find the link to the scene I'm talking about here.  HILARIOUS.

Finally, I couldn't take it anymore, so I asked Ben to do the unthinkable - to pee on my leg.  We went out onto the porch, which has a drain and a faucet, and...yep.  He peed on my leg.  It was so, so very gross.  I washed myself off as soon as possible afterwards.  Bleeeeuuuuuughhhhh....

But you know what?  The pain immediately went away.  The redness started immediately dissipating.  By the next day, you couldn't even see a red spot or that anything had happened. 

So now you know.  If you get stung by a jellyfish, pee on yourself.  Or have someone else pee on you.

I'm not sure where we ate dinner that night, but once we got into town, Ben and I turned in our bikes.  Nick and Kathleen were leaving, so we wouldn't need the bikes to ride that long distance anymore.  Our hotel was only one block away from the center of town, so we knew we'd be okay without bikes.  And we were sick of replacing bike parts.

Then we headed home to do some laundry and sit on the porch and read.