Aruba

Another first for John and I.  We leave the port area and rent a car. 

 I ask Dave if he’ll drive because we need a minivan for all of us to get in and we get the car for the whole day for less than the taxi wants to take us to 3 places for a couple of hours.  Julie’s excited because we get to lock our stuff in and this seems like such a great idea when we make our first stop at the beach until braking caused the van to shut off.  Dave coasted to a stop in the parking lot and we’re going to have to see if this keeps up.  We enjoy watching the

  kite surfers, the beautiful waters and walking through the soft sand.  The kids want to stay some more, but we’re going to try to get in some actual sight seeing on this tiny island.  We head to the California Lighthouse and it’s easy to follow the signs, the tour buses and other people making their way there.  The lighthouse has a great panorama and you can see the sea starting to change as we 

make our way to the windy side of the island.  We get back in the van to go to the natural bridge and we figured wrong when we thought that the map, signs or other tour buses would help us here.   But Aruba doesn’t have signs on their 4 highways, I guess you’re just supposed to know if you’re on the A1 or the 2B by feel alone.

 The map is not much use because it has only the main arteries and then white wavy lines for all the streets with houses on them.  We stop to get some snacks at a grocery store and Dave finally has to pull up Waze on his phone to get us there.  We get to the natural bridge and the gold smelting ruins.  The baby bridge is still intact, but the big natural bridge collapsed.  The baby bridge is still pretty

  impressive, the waves are impressive as is the stacks of stones that people have started leaving around the area.  We took all the time

 we wanted to explore and just spend time here because we only have one more stop that we want to make.  We hit the bathrooms, which costs us a $1 each to use, but are spacious and worth it.  Oscar gets to come in free with me at least.  We climb the ruins, (well not

 me because that fall on the first day has led to some pretty substantial bruises and a tendon strain that makes it impossible for me to pull my leg up without it hurting which makes bending down to my son, getting on the floor, getting off the floor, climbing stairs and

putting on my shoes hard.  It also makes climbing out of bed in the middle of the night and back into hard because we take up the whole floor space now that Oscar won’t sleep in the bunk after falling out of it;) and we get back in our little van which now stalls so often, that 

 Dave can’t even brake for traffic without having to throw it in neutral, restart it and get going again.  He has gotten very adept at this by the time that we make it through traffic back to the port area.  And at least we did make it back to the port area.  We stopped at

 Calibari rocks and it was fun to climb all over them, but the heat, lack of adequate AC in the van and the sun combined to cause me to not feel good.  I think it’s a little bit of overheating, but when I have to fight Oscar to come back to the

 ship without daddy because he’s returning the car, it takes a toll.  So, we were exhausted by the time we got back to the ship, but we got to see all the

things that we wanted to see, on our time table, for cheap, which made up for the lack of knowledge about where we were going and having to restart the van all the time.  Although, Dave might have a different take on that situation….