One Happy Island!

It’s Saturday! I’m starting to lose track of the days, so I need to keep reminding myself. Not really being a morning person, I decided to just get up whenever I woke up. I found out that as long as I make it to the Lido deck by 10 a.m. I can still get the breakfast buffet, which goes until 10:30. Our ship arrived in Oranjestad, Aruba at 1:00 in the afternoon. Since I had been to Aruba before I didn’t book any shore tour and decided to wait until the crowd of people on tours had time to disembark.

Aruba is the “A” in the Dutch ABC islands. Although Aruba continues to exist within the kingdom of the Netherlands, it functions independently. It’s a nice, clean island, with happy people. In fact, “One Happy Island” is on all of their license plates. Aruba is a desert island. All the rain falls on nearby Venezuela and then skips over Aruba. The first time I came here was on my very first cruise in 1991. It’s hard to believe that was 20 years ago! I thought it would be fun to retrace my steps from that first time so I started walking toward Wilhelmina Park. It sure has changed in 20 years! None of these businesses were here then. There she was, Queen Wilhelmina, in all of her white stone glory, still holding court over the iguanas and beautiful view of the Caribbean. It’s hot, just like 20 years ago…probably in the upper 80s.

A friend recommended some good restaurants and since our ship is docked until 11:00 p.m. I thought it would be fun to eat in port tonight. I’ll keep an eye out for some others in our group and see if they want to join me. My friend said that one of the restaurants was off on a side street, but was well worth looking up as it is a great local restaurant with wonderful food. I walked up and down and couldn’t see it. I saw a guard at the door to one of the casinos and asked him and he told me exactly where it was. I had only been a block from it a few minutes ago! I went there and found the owners hanging around outside the door. The restaurant didn’t open for a couple more hours but they invited me in to look at the menu. In addition to the regular menu they were having a special menu tonight. A 3-course meal for $25 per person. Looked good!
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I headed back downtown, really getting thirsty from my walk, so decided to stop in at Iguana Joes for a cold drink. I walked up to the second story open air restaurant and ran into Debbi & Jayne. They had had some problems with their shore tour earlier that day so I offered to go back to the ship with them and see if we could get it straightened out. On the way I passed Billie, Mike, Pam and Clyde. They were looking for a place to eat out later and thought my restaurant find sounded good. We agreed to come back and meet on that same street corner at 7 p.m.

7 p.m. rolled around and our group was growing! We ended up with 9 of us in all! The Driftwood turned out to be everything my friend said it was. The food was wonderful! Everything was fresh, and local. I had the shrimp. I didn’t know shrimp could grow that big! I was glad we had a few blocks to walk back to the ship after that meal! It was dark, and still quite warm…a beautiful night. We took a picture of our ship all lit up. She sure is beautiful!