CPUnk I write right. Right? Aye.

A pox on Sardinia and all they stand for

So, after a day of dejec­tion and dis­ap­point­ment — Kathy spent the morn­ing reor­ga­niz­ing our trip to get us back on track. Since Sar­din­ian for “spa” is “crapolini” … we decided it’d be nice to stay at a nice place when we get out of here. This morn­ing, Kathy called the orga­ni­za­tion that did the great hotel in Flo­rence (I think it’s called some­thing like “Great­est Hotels in the World ™” (I kid you not)), and sched­uled for our stay in Barcelona to be only a few days, then we spend a longer time in Madrid, which we hear is pretty cool as cities go.

So, suf­fice to say — we were pretty excited about that, she and I — and the day started out well. We had a lit­tle pep in our step and decided to just “punt” on Sar­dinia, not try to do too much, and get outta here in one piece.

After our deli­ciously cold break­fast (com­plete with oily cheese slices!), we decided we’d go to another beach and see if we couldn’t find a way to get a lit­tle snor­kel­ing in, since Nate was pretty avid about that (being that he was just cer­ti­fied in the Bain­bridge Island pool, and wants to be able to tell his bud­dies sto­ries about his great swim­ming escapades). So we asked the peo­ple behind the desk about a place to snorkel … and they gave us the name of some dive shop nearby that seemed to look pretty good in the brochure (and did end up being good overall…).

We headed off to the dive shop, saw that it was near a beach, and thought we’d have some fun going to the beach after get­ting the snorkel setup going.

When we got there, we soon learned that this was pri­mar­ily a scuba dive shop (which we knew), but they had a pri­vate area we could snorkel in that was filled with inter­est­ing stuff (pre­sum­ably). They gave us wet suits (mine was a full body scuba suit because they had noth­ing else), and before we knew it — we were heft­ing about 30 pounds of gear down to the water for a “quick snorkel.”

In short order, this became a trial — Angie didn’t like the taste of her snorkel, the wet suits were too hot, the water was actu­ally up against a cliff with a plat­form — no beach — and it was all get­ting a lit­tle hairball.

After a lit­tle grap­pling, I was in the water, help­ing the kids into the water, and Kathy was strug­gling to fig­ure out how to fit her glasses on under her mask because she’s basi­cally blind with­out them. She even­tu­ally opted to leave the glasses on the plat­form and just make do anyway.

So there I am, stand­ing in water up to my neck in a wet­suit with all the snorkel gear and fins, Angie is float­ing around face down nearby in a wet­suit shorty, fuss­ing with her mask and snorkel, Nate is cling­ing to my side, the lad­der and back and forth (valiantly, I might add, con­sid­er­ing his trep­i­da­tion about swim­ming in open water), and Kathy’s func­tion­ally blind. Rock on! Let’s swim!

We headed out around a sail­boat that was anchored nearby, with Nate swim­ming tan­dem with me while I dragged the dive buoy (did I men­tion that I had a weighted buoy with me, a require­ment of the dive shop?), Angie’s splash­ing ahead with mom, and we’re get­ting along some­what ok, all things con­sid­ered. I think at some point, Kathy took the buoy and we set it up as we got around the far side of the sail­boat (which was a 30 footer, I believe).

Now we’re in 20 ft of water, try­ing to “get the joy” going on the snorkel stuff (our orig­i­nal vision was like walk­ing off a beach with a tube in our mouths to look at lit­tle crabs, not this) … we swim over to a cliff face, and I’m teach­ing Nate to float face down with his tube up and just dan­gle from the rock. He’s a bit freaked out, but get­ting into it a bit — when Angie and Kathy just start hair­balling over Angie’s mask. She’s fuss­ing and flip­ping out, and com­plain­ing that it tastes bad and that water was get­ting into her mask and fuss, fuss, fuss. So brave Nate wraps his arms around a rock and says, “I’m ok Dad, you can go ahead.” I’m proud of him for that. I swam over to Angie and Kathy, who were grap­pling with her mask.

Given that I’ve done a bunch of scuba, etc. — I was also act­ing as the portable dive plat­form — any time some­one needed a break in open water, they’d hang on me and I’d just float and kick, keep­ing us all afloat (ver­ti­cal, not like an actual plat­form, thanks).

So, I come over, wrap my arm around Angie and am start­ing to help her adjust her mask (again), when she starts shriek­ing that some­thing bit her and then just starts shriek­ing that it hurts, it hurts.

I imme­di­ately swim us back about five feet and check the water, only to see that there’s a jel­ly­fish about the size of a foot­ball right where we were. She’s been stung.

It’s float­ing towards Kathy, so I tell her to come out towards me and swim around it (she’s blind, mind you) — which she does just fine. Angie is now apoplec­tic with pain and shriek­ing (justifiably).

At this point, Nate is rapidly devolv­ing into brain­stem sur­vival mode — filled with com­plete and absolute dread. He’s in deep water, which he hates, hang­ing on a rock, not sure what is in the water, and well … he’s flip­ping out. Mean­while, I’ve got an arm­ful of shriek­ing Angie, and a func­tion­ally blind wife. We paid cash for this expe­ri­ence, mind you.

So Kathy gets over to Nate pretty quick, and he’s yelling that he doesn’t want to die, and she’s telling him he’s not going to die, and I see that the thing is float­ing towards them — so he’s even more freaked out … and I tell her that I’m get­ting Angie out of there, and she does like­wise with Nate.

So the two of us swim on our backs and rescue-swim the kids back around the sail­boat, back to the plat­form — me, I’m going about a mil­lion miles an hour, Kathy’s only doing about half a mil­lion — I think we were at the plat­form in under a two min­utes. I pull the fins off Angie in the water, she climbs out, and her arm, from a few inches above her elbow to a few inches below, on the inside, is cov­ered with angry red welts and white swelling — it looked just like the red marks on Dory from Find­ing Nemo — I kid you not.

Kathy and I got the kids out of the water, got Kathy out of the water, and I swam back to get that stu­pid buoy. I hate that buoy. I hate this island.

Kathy imme­di­ately took Angie back up the cliff path to the dive shop, where they knew what to do (they poured ammo­nia on the thing to neu­tral­ize the acid) — and Angie started calm­ing down. Nate stuck around with me to help me carry all the gear back up the hill … and while we were going up, he valiantly said that he’d let Angie play the com­puter games when we got back to the hotel

So … with all that excite­ment, we opted to skip the beach for the rest of the day. We made a lot of jokes about Find­ing Nemo, called Angie “Jelly Girl” a lot — and talked about “thrill issues” and so forth, and got past it.

Later in the day, Nate wanted to go down to the pool — and he and I had a great time in the water, which was a big plus for block­ing any water fear he might have had from this — but I fear the kids may be a lit­tle jumpy about the open sea if we don’t do some­thing soon — so I’m hop­ing we’ll get a chance to get them in the water unvent­fully pretty soon.

We ended up hav­ing a good din­ner — we got back here exhausted — I had the joy of dri­ving in the dark with Ital­ian dri­vers — and all is rel­a­tively quiet.

I fought a lot of urges to ask God to smite this island. Smite smite smite.

Well — what­ever, we’re leav­ing soon. I don’t think I’ll ever want to come back. Kathy says she might some­day with her sis­ter or some­thing. I have no idea why.

Stu­pid island full of sullen … whatever…

by the way — Ital­ian for jel­ly­fish is Meduse … that’s fitting.

Angie’s arm is still cov­ered with big angry red marks.

Good night.