ARUBA!!! Our vacation 2015 has finally arrived. After booking this in February 2014 and a long winter last year and an already super cold start to 2015, we are so happy to finally be in Aruba. Flying directly out of Chicago proved to be a good choice with no worries of missing connections. The only downside of leaving out of Chicago with an 8:25a.m. flight was the 2:30 wake-up so that we could get to Tom and Linda’s house for our ride to O’Hare. Linda found an excellent deal from a limo company out of Racine. We had a giant stretch limo that just barely fit our 14 passengers and luggage. Although a limo sounds fancy and luxurious, we found the seats to be a little uncomfortable and lack of heat near the floor left our feet begging for the warmth and sand of Aruba.
On Saturday we arrived and drove through a bit of town to get to our resort. The island does not have the same poverty feel that other islands we have been to. We went by where the cruise ships dock and could definitely tell that part of town was built for them. Lots and lots of upscale shopping and some chain restaurants. Our resort is several miles away from this area. When we got to the resort we found check-in and received our room assignments on the 9th floor. This is the top floor and reserved for First Club vacation members. We are so thankful that Pete and Laurie have this vacation club that we’re allowed to be a part of. Our room is conjoined with Pete and Laurie’s enormous suite overlooking the ocean. Tom and Linda’s room conjoin on the other side. Our room is like a standard hotel room with two queen (maybe feels a little bit smaller, but not as small as a double bed) beds. Pete and Laurie’s room has a huge living room with full kitchen. All of them have great ocean views.
Saturday night as we were getting ready to say our good nights for the evening, when Pete and Laurie mentioned they were going for a walk in the morning at 7:00 . . . to the lighthouse. I read about the California Lighthouse and knew it was on the North side of the island. I wasn’t sure how far it was exactly, but they thought it was about 4 miles one-way. My first thought that it sounded crazy, but come 6:30a.m. on Sunday morning I was all in. Our walk started along the nice sidewalk/boardwalk that connects all the hotels to each other. When the hotels ended we moved up to the road and walked along the road. We started noticing a lot of people walking the other direction and thought a lot of people sure did get out and exercise here. We soon realized they were part of a local 5K that was fundraising for a tennis club. When we got close enough to the lighthouse to see the landscape around it, Aunt Janet said she had gone far enough. Pete, Laurie, and I were committed to go the whole way. It was 3.75 miles to the lighthouse!
From the lighthouse we saw some off road tracks down to the beach. The water look relatively close so we decided to check it out. .3 miles later and we were looking at some beautiful scenery. Two and a half hours and 8.6 miles later we were back at the resort. My legs felt a little sore and I was quite thirsty, but loved the adventure out. The only downfall of the trip was that I took my phone to do some geocaching along the way, as I knew there was one at the lighthouse. Unfortunately I didn’t find out until we started walking that I couldn’t access the caches because they were stored on-line (I had thought I saved them to the phone), so I could not do any geocaching. On the upside, I knew I could remedy this as soon as I had access to WIFI.
The afternoon was spent lounging by the pool and playing in the ocean. At 3:00 we headed over to the Holiday Inn where we had heard they had a sports book in their casino so we could place bets on the Packers/Seattle game. Tom Sr and Uncle Dave went with the Packers (8.5 spread) and Tom went against our team with Seattle in the hopes that if they loss, he still might be happy winning the bet. We found a great bar on the beach that was filled with other Packer fans to watch the game. The game started out great. We couldn’t believe the Packer’s were winning. Of course it all came crashing down and Tom didn’t even win his bet because Seattle had only beaten us by 6. Even though our team lost, it was still a lot of fun to be able to watch the game in Aruba. Of course it would have been 10 times more fun if they had won. Oh well maybe next year. At least we have the sun and beach to look forward to tomorrow.
