Aruba!

After almost three whole days at sea, we made it to our first port of call: Aruba!

I feel, before I show you the Aruba pictures, that I should show you one of Ryan's favorites. We went for a walk on the ship track that morning, and the wind was...intense. He enjoyed my hair in this one:

We were pretty excited to see land. It had been a while!

Neither of us had ever been to Aruba before, and neither of us had any idea it was as close to South America as it is. (Seventeen miles from the coast of Venezuela.) Ryan had arranged for us to have the "Granny Tour" on this island. We were on a charter bus tour that took us all over the island and showed us some of the most well-known spots. Our tour guide's name was Melvin, and he was really great at his job.

The first place he took us was a lighthouse, which made me so happy. I love lighthouses!!! We didn't go up in this one for two reasons. One, we were only there for about 15 minutes and two, you had to pay. We hated to pay just to run up the stairs and run back down. So we just enjoyed the view from the bottom!

The view around the lighthouse was really beautiful. It was fascinating to me to see cacti growing beside such beautiful waters. (The island of Aruba was very dusty and desert-like as soon as you walked off the beaches of the coastline.)

We got back on the bus and he drove us across the island to a natural bridge area. Melvin told us there used to be two bridges, but one eventually crumbled (thankfully at night when no one was on it) and they've restricted the other one to keep people from using it so it will - hopefully - continue to stand. This was one of the areas I referred to in the podcast that I wished we could have stayed at for longer than 15 minutes, because it was beautiful, and I wanted to soak it up more and take more pictures!

 Shout out to the person on the bridge - beyond the sign that says don't enter.

(Poor Ryan: he was stuck on the Granny Tour with me and right in this area, there were all kinds of people rip-roaring past us on ATVs. THAT would have been his kind of tour! )

On our way to the next stop, I grabbed a couple of pictures out the bus window. Gorgeous little beach-lets.

Melvin made an unscheduled stop at this really cool place. It was an old gold mill, and it would have been so much fun to climb to the top of and take ridiculous amounts of pictures. We made do with the five or so minutes we had. Please let the record show I did climb up over halfway. Ryan made it to the top, but he's fast, you know. :)

We stopped by some really cool rock formations too...a couple of different ones. The second one involved a climb to the top and we were able to see our ship from there!

 See King Kong?

We stopped by a beach at the end of the tour, but the place was so packed that no one on the bus (except me) wanted to get off. And you can BET YOUR BUTTONS I wasn't going to be "that girl" on the tour! (Little did I know I was going to be "that girl" on another tour later in the week.)

I did get a quick picture of the famous trees at the beach though!!

Ryan wanted a picture with our guide, since they're twins. :)

We did a quick photo opp before getting back on board! Hey from Aruba!

And then we walked up 12 flights of stairs.

Our boat was in port until about 10:30 that night, but we (okay I) wanted to be safely on board before dark. Gorgeous view of the island after dark, though!

I really enjoyed Aruba. I thought it was a beautiful island - and my only wish was that we could have spent more time exploring each of the places we got to see during our tour. Still, I'm grateful I got to see it, even for a few hours!