In 2015, I went to Navarre Beach, Florida. The morning that I woke up to go to Florida, I rushed to pack up all of my stuff. my clothes, swim stuff, and other things. On the way to Florida, we went to many places including Nashville, Tennessee. In Tennessee, we went to Elvis Presley’s house. We also shopped in stores for souvenirs in places besides Florida. When we got to Florida, we went to an island called, Navarre Island and It had lots of traffic. We went to a hotel on the island, unpacked our stuff, and went to go play laser tag. Laser tag was really fun and I destroyed all of the people that I went up against because I’m cool. After that, we went to a mall that was close by and went shopping and got some cool souvenirs. After we got done with that, we figured out that the mall had mini golf, so we played that at night. It was pretty fun but I lost. After that was over, we went to the hotel and went to sleep.

The morning after that, it was time to go to the beach so my two cousins, my aunt and uncle, and I got on our swimming clothes. We went to the beach and the smell of seafood vendors relaxed my nose even though I do not like seafood. Once we got to the beach I heard the sound of the seagulls flying freely around and the beautiful ocean waves were graceful in the wind. I went into the sea water (forgetting to put sunscreen on). As soon as I got to where I could not touch, I got dunked underwater by the waves. The taste of the salty sea water insulted my mouth as I was choking on it. This happened to me about five times before I decided it was a good idea not to go where I could not touch. After hours of making sand castles and splashing in the sea water, it was time to go back to the hotel and take a shower so we could go eat. My parents noticed I was a little sunburnt but it was not too bad. After the day was over and it was time to go to bed. When I woke up the next morning, I went to go change and I saw myself in the mirror and was shocked at what had happened overnight. I looked like a lobster. I was red all over my body. Whenever I moved or touched my body, I had pain. I showed my parents and they were very surprised to see what happened to me. I went to the fridge, opened it to grab something to eat and I blacked out for a couple seconds and collapsed on the floor from the sunburn. All day that day my body hurt and I regretted going to the beach without sunscreen.

On the uncomfortable way back to Kansas, it hurt whenever I moved and I couldn’t even fall asleep because it was so painful. My skin was burning and painful to the touch. We stopped a couple times at gas stations for snacks and gas and people were looking at me with pity because of my exposed arms and legs that were sunburnt, but they did not know the full extent of it.

Weeks of people asking me what happened and pain to my skin went by but the sunburn finally went away and I  got better. Something that I learned on my trip to Florida is to never go to the beach without sunscreen.