Our adventures in ARUBA!!!!

Hello from Aruba!!!

We are having a great time down here in the sun and sand. A bit about what we have done...
Saturday Jan 24th. We left home at 4am and headed to the airport. We left Edmonton at 7am and arrived in Chicago around 10:30am. We had just enough time to eat and run to our next gate. At 12:30 we headed to Miami, we had to sit in the plane for an hour, but once we got out we had to RUN to get our connection. We left Miami around 8pm and were in ARBUA by midnight. We have a three hour time difference. It was a beautiful 26 degrees here. Our luggage stayed in Miami, but thankfully I had packed a change of clothes for each of us in the carry on.

We have had rain every morning, and a few afternoons. It only lasts a few minutes but at times the wind is so strong, everything blows away. The trade winds here blow all the time. It can get annoying, you can not get out of the wind. But they do make the heat bearable. It is over 30 degrees everyday. We are getting great tans. Even though we are wearing SPF 50 all the time.

Benjamin loves playing in the sand with Emma. Ryan does not like the beach, but loves the pool. So we split our time. There is a lazy river that is so relaxing. We bought tubes and float through for hours everyday. My arms, back and face are getting the darkest becasue of it. Sadly Ash only has another day and a half here with us. But we are going to make the most of it.

We have been out to the Natural Bridge and the gold mine ruins, we tried snorkeling at baby beach, but the winds made the water to rough for us unexperienced snorkelers. Then we had a crazy rain, so we came back to the calm pool.

The national language here is Papiamento. It is a mixture of Dutch, Spanish and English. Locals are fluent in all three. The population of the island is 103, 000. Most are employed in the hospitality and tourism industries. The currency here is the florin, they have square coins!!! every one accepts american money, The conversion is $1 us dollar $0.55 florin. They do not use pennies, so they round to the nearest nickle.

We are going for a sunset sail tonight with Mike and Sarah. I am loking forward to that. Oh I should mention, our diaper bag was stollen and with it went our camera. So sadly we will have no pictures from our trip. But we will have lots of memories to share with you!!