One Happy Island

Wednesday of the cruise was spent in Aruba. The motto for Aruba is One Happy Island. I think it would be difficult to not be happy while you are there. It is one beautiful place!

See how excited Hubby is for our day? He's checking out the map.

We traveled around on a bus and were able to see quite a bit of the island.  It was a pretty hot day and the bus we were on didn't have a very good working air conditioner. Thankfully the driver made arrangements for us to switch buses for one that was much cooler. I still was pretty darn hot and sweaty by the time I got back to the ship. (But I still say it beats the cold dreary winter weather of the Not So Great White North.

Our driver was quite chatty and took us all over the place to see rock formations....

Hi Hubby!

 the north shore...

 an old light house...

It was so flipping bright when we were at the lighthouse, I couldn't see what the screen on the back of my camera was showing. One photo was a bit crooked:

Aruba is considered a dessert island. I was surprised to hear that. But there were cactus all over the place:

 I think my favorist (is that a word?) stop for the day was at an ostrich and emu farm.

Two toes.

Ostriches sure are odd creatures. I tell ya, God has quite the imagination!

I think this guy was in time out. He never left the corner. All the other ostriches were very curious and came to look at whoever was nearby.

My only disappointment for the day was that we really didn't have time for shopping. Our excursion was supposed to include that, but there just wasn't time.

(And I need to throw in here something I want to remember when I read back through this someday down the road.)
As the bus driver was making his way back to the cruise ship, I was watching out the window and spotted something that made me very excited. So much so I smacked Hubby and said, "Look! Look!" There was a restaurant called Delifrance. This was a restaurant that was in Singapore. We have a joke in our family about Delifrance. One Christmas when we were living in Singapore, I was out shopping for a present for Hubby. He called me at lunchtime and asked where I was. I thought that if I told him which mall I was in, he would guess what I was shopping for. I happened to be eating lunch at a Delifrance and was looking at the paper place-mat that listed all of the outlets on the island (of which there were more than 40) So I told him I was at Delifrance, knowing he would have no idea where exactly I was. To this day when one of us is somewhere we don't want anyone else to know (likely because of shopping for a gift) we just tell others we are at Delifrance, which is code for none-of-your-business.

Okay, back to our regularly scheduled program....

After dinner we wandered around the ship and looked in some shops. We went to a show in the big theater on board. We did that several nights and heard a comedian and a couple of different impressionists. After the show, we ended up in a lounge listening to a piano player and entertainer. He was quite good. One of my sisters and her hubby were in the same lounge. Still kind of interesting how, on such a big ship, we could run into family unplanned.


More to come...