"Joe, Jellyfish!"

**This is J in the A-Z series**

I'm falling a little bit behind in my posts. But in my defense, I've been so busy on our vacation and then so bone tired at night, that I'm finding it very difficult to think straight and therefore come up with witty blog banter for your reading pleasure. I got some good material today, however, so I better write it all down before I become too tired to remember it straight.

We enjoyed another beautiful day here in St. Lucia. Our last full day in fact. Tomorrow we will fly home and return to the grind of daily life. I'm fine with that though because, well, I miss my kids. A lot. I seriously can't wait to get a "break" and then it comes and I think of my kids the whole dang time. Especially Cora. Sweet little Cora. I want to kiss and smell her and elicit big smiles and sweet little baby giggles so badly from her that I can hardly stand it.

But I digress, I was going to talk about jellyfish. So I mentioned that we had a beautiful day, and we did. We got to play "castaway" on a deserted beach that has the St. Lucian equivalent of a hippie commune on one end with the rest of the beach gloriously deserted (It might have been a little to castaway-ish for my friend Kristine because at one point she asked for a volleyball that she could name Wilson). It is right at the base of Gros Piton (my arch nemesis, more on that later) and best accessed by water taxi. We had a guy named Pogi (Pah-jee) who was quite the character, pick us up in his boat from the beach right below our villa and take us there. We packed a lunch and a lot of sunscreen and water and happily waved goodbye to Pogi as we started on our castaway day. The beach was like an aquarium. It was pretty rocky and not fabulous for casual bathing but it was wonderful for snorkeling. We saw many, many beautiful fish, corals, and plants. And not one single, solitary jellyfish. After 4 hours, Pogi came back for us and we headed to a place he likes to call the Coral Gardens (a protected marine reserve in the water).

The water at this spot was pristine. My friend Mark said it looked just like windex, and he was right. It was a beautiful dark blue color and perfectly crystal clear. It was so inviting. It was like the water was screaming, "Jump in! Jump in!". And so we did. Pogi told us if we were lucky, we'd see a turtle or two swim past. The bottom was about 10 feet down and just littered with these giant boulders and long stretches of coral. So at first, I was completely enthralled with the sea life. Suddenly, I felt a sharp sting, like a bee sting, right on my stomach and I sort of startled. I began looking around to find the source of the sting and noticed, like in a horror movie, we were surrounded by dozens (and I mean dozens) of these little jellyfish. We had jumped right into a big swarm of them. Everywhere I looked I was surrounded. Now, I was the first to notice this and came up to the surface quite horrified and informed my friend Mark, who was closest to me, of our delimma. He began looking around and quickly noticed them as well. We swam over to warn Joe and Mark's wife Kristine about the swarm. Pretty soon we were all on edge and trying to avoid the jellyfish.

At that point I decided the fun snorkel experience was over and started heading to the boat. Joe was just a little way ahead of me when I noticed he was swimming right into two or three of the jellyfish and I yelled, "Joe! Jellyfish!" to get his attention. Except I was underwater and it came out sounding more like, "Blerghhhhhhhgargle! Blagggggggle!". So I guess it isn't really his fault that he didn't turn around to look. I tapped his fin and he looked back at me. That was when he noticed the jellyfish, which had unfortunately floated right up to his face. And let me tell you, the look on his face when he noticed was priceless! As in, it was worth getting stung twice to watch him jump while underwater to get away, wide eyed with surprise and a little terror. And the best part was that when he jerked up and away, the jellyfish went with him, because it was stuck to his face mask. Oh yes. I will never, ever forget that moment. Just since it happened, I've put it on my top ten list of most funny things ever :).