Day 5

Over the past 5 days we have had the most wonderful time in the Florida Keys! From kissing alligators to late night campfires, the trip has been a blast. On the final day of the trip, we started our day with community service. We helped clean up an area of Windley Key State Park that still had a lot of debris left over from Hurricane Irma (from September 2017). It was hard work but definitely worth it in the end! We were able to remove over 1900 pounds of debris in just over an hour! After cleaning up a lot of wood, mattresses, dressers, TVs, we loaded back on the bus and headed to John Pennekamp State Park to kayak. Kayaking was so much fun! We went through some very narrow mangrove tunnels - we couldn't even use our paddles in some parts, so we had to pull ourselves along the low hanging mangrove branches, like monkey bars. Our guide, Ms. Heather, taught us about the three different kinds of mangrove trees (white, black, and red), and how important they are to the Florida Keys ecosystems. For our final stop of the trip, we got fresh tropical fruit smoothies from Robert is Here. They were so good! I got pineapple, mango, and passionfruit. Others tried things like guanabana, black sapote, mamey fruit, and dragonfruit. After getting our amazing smoothies, it was unfortunately time to go back to the airport and head home to Houston. We've had such a good time on this trip and everyone had tons of fun!