The kids and I started off the day by going exploring and trying to find the Palmas shopping plaza. And getting lost. We forgot to take a map, and Palmas has very windy roads, so you can’t just go straight from point A to point B (the map we have is pretty awful anyway, so it may not have helped). The plaza is pretty much just behind the neighborhood where we are, but there isn’t a path that goes directly there. We thought we’d make it easier by walking down the beach and then just cutting inland when we got close. But that didn’t work. We went too far and ended up walking in a big loop before getting where we needed to be.
When we finally found the shopping plaza, about 30 minutes after we left, we were super hot and super sweaty. We got some drinks at the little market and sat around cooling off. We could see the roofs of our neighborhood, but still had to go around to the beach to get back to it. It took us less than 10 minutes to get back to the condo, and only took that long because we had to stop and look at every lizard along the way.
After John got up, we all walked down to the safe beach (today at our beach they not only had the regular signs warning of dangerous surf, they also had big red “no swimming” flags in the sand--right next to where people, including kids, were swimming.)
We had a wonderful time. The water was the perfect temperature, and very calm. The kids all swam around with their goggles looking for fish. They found a bunch. They'd love to go snorkeling. Squig found some curly seaweed.
And then it attacked her.
Unfortunately, our afternoon ended on a sour note, when John was stung in the foot by what we think was a stingray. He probably stepped on it, which they don’t like. We washed it with the drinking water we had and got the bleeding to stop and put a bandaid on it to keep it clean. We walked back to the condo as fast as we could, he washed off the wound and went to the E.R., where he waited for a long time (hey, just like back home!) Once he did get in, they didn’t really seem to know what to do.
Eventually, they decided it probably was a stingray (and a small one, which meant less venom), but weren’t sure, and gave him two IV antibiotics (which took forever) and three prescriptions (muscle relaxer, pain killer and another antibiotic) and sent him home. He got back around 2:30 a.m. Crazy.
He's feeling much better this morning.
Poor John.
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