Royal Caribbean Grandeur of the Seas - Aruba Photos And Journal - November 27, 2007

Aruba

Monday, November 27, 2006

2923-E Olney-Sandy Spring Road Olney, MD 20832 Phone: 301-774-4646 Fax: 301-774-3610		*Send Me An Email To* *Comment Or Book A Vacation* *mailto:lynx@lynx-travel.com* http://www.lynx-travel.com

I woke up at 6:30 AM and had breakfast at the Windjammer Café, with my usual seafood omelet. I sat outside and when I was finished I got up to take a few pictures of Oranjestad. This is when I almost lost the top of my head. When I stood up and started walking toward the window on the pool deck I walked right into a fan. I caught the fan blade in the head at least four times. At least it was on a slow speed so I didn’t kill myself. These ships are definitely not made for people as tall as I am.

I stopped by mom and dad’s room to drop off my laptop for dad to use during the day. They were just going to stay on the ship today. I made plans to meet them outside the Aruba cruise terminal after my tour in case they wanted to walk through town.

I saw John while waiting to head down to my tour. He was going to rent a jeep for the day for the family. I was booked for the Off Road Adventure Tour that met at 8:05 AM. Debbie and Clyde were downstairs also for their tour, I think it was the Sea and Sail Tour.

We had 11 people for the Off Road Adventure Tour and we were taken by bus from the cruise terminal to De Palm Tours location. The two girls I had been talking to yesterday at the bar in Curacao were on the tour Alison and Linda.

We met our guide for the day, Jose. He was originally from Ecuador and he had been in Aruba for 13 years. He had been with the tour company for 1.5 years after working in a bakery. That was quite a change of professions. The Off Road Adventure had us riding Jeep Wranglers throughout the whole island. I was matched with Bill and Nancy from Columbia, MD. They were real nice. They had some shirts that had a ROADEO insignia. I asked what they were and Nancy told me she works for the state of Maryland’s road crews and she helps putting together a rodeo for the road crew workers. It sounded pretty cool. They have it in September so I’ll have to see if I can find it next year.

I decided the best way to take the tour was take the back seat with our backpacks and let Bill and Nancy ride up front. Bill drove the entire way. It would have been cool to drive and he kept offering to let me have a turn but I enjoyed the back with a little extra room and it allowed me to take pictures.

The tour started from Oranjestad and headed north passing a shipwreck just off shore. This was a tanker, the Pedernaes that was sunk by a German submarine. Apparently this ship had been off shore about 3 miles until Hurricane Lenny came near the island. It actually moved the ship from its underwater location to right off the shoreline.

Our first stop was the California Lighthouse on the northern point of the island. It was named the California Lighthouse after a ship that wrecked off this portion of the coast. We pulled the jeep up in front of the lighthouse and they took a picture of us in the jeep. After the tour I bought the picture. They were selling the picture alone for $15 or the picture and 2 t-shirts for $20. I didn’t think the shirt would fit so I bought smaller ones to give the kids.

We headed south down the eastern coast of the island until we headed to the off road portion. It was a lot of fun. They did have a lot of tours running out on this desolate side of the island. There were some other jeep tours and we also saw ATV tours and horse tours.

I’ve always thought Aruba is a strange island. It you took away the Caribbean Sea from your views you would think you are in Arizona. There is not much grass, giant boulders everywhere and thousands of cacti. We drove down the coast some until our next stop the chapel of Alto Vista. This was a small one room chapel that was located in the middle of nowhere. I think Jose told us it was one of the 1^st places of worship on the island.

One of the neat features of this tour was that Jose could talk to us from his lead truck via a radio system. So he would give us information on what we were driving by. He had his radio on in the background and I every once and awhile he would start singing with the music. I swear there were times where he was doing it and just forgot that we could hear everything he was saying in his truck. I particularly liked his version of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama.

We continued down the coast and drove by one of the six natural bridges on the island. There used to be seven buy unfortunately the largest and most famous on the island the Natural Bridge collapsed in September of 2005. Jose called it the Ex-Natural Bridge. The one we passed first was called the Baby Bridge.

Near the Baby Bridge was the Blow Hole. We all drove by the Blow Hole and stopped for awhile to take pictures. When the water would blow out of the hole the spray would blow out and cause a mini rainbow for a few seconds. It was real pretty.

We continued south from the Blow Hole and made our next stop at the Bushirbana Gold Mine. It was the rock ruins of the building where they processed gold from the area. Again, if you took the Caribbean Sea away you would swear this was right out of the old west. The other predominate feature of the area were hundreds of stacks of the tiny rocks all over the area. People stack the rocks and make wishes. It was a fairly new tradition Jose told us. I told him they do a similar thing on Hawaii with the volcanic rocks.

We proceeded a little farther to the end of our off road portion of the tour at the Ex Natural Bridge. It’s really a shame what happened since it was the most famous sight on the island but it was just Mother Nature doing her thing. Thank goodness it collapsed during the evening. People used to walk over the bridge during the day. If it had collapsed during the day a lot of people would have been hurt. No one was in the area but people miles down the road heard the collapse.

We started to head back on real roads back to the inhabited side of the mountain and passed the Ayo Rock Formations. They are giant boulders in the middle of the island. I know last time I was hear we actually climbed to the top of the boulders. There was no one climbing them today. I don’t know if the stopped the practice or they were closed. We drove by one giant boulder near the road that looked just like an elephant. It was incredible looking. It even had a dark disturbance in the light gray in the area of the eye.

We also passed a perfect cactus fence across from the Ayo Rock Foundation. The cactus fence definitely would keep intruders from jumping the fence. It has to be much more effective than a chain link fence.

We arrived at our final stop of the day the De Palm Island. I hadn’t even read that far into the tour description to realize we were making this stop. It was right across from one of the two desalinization plants on the island. While waiting for the boat to take us across the inlet we saw an amazing blue lizard that was a little larger than a gecko. It was almost turquoise in color. Jose told us that was a male and then we saw the female that was much smaller and just a dull green color. Mark down one victory for males.

The island was really cool. They had just built a small water park with about 6 intertwined slides and they had snorkeling, snuba and sea trek programs. The island is all inclusive, although since we were on a driving tour we weren’t allowed alcohol. We had about 2.5 hours on the island and we started by going to the buffet. I had some chicken and ribs before heading to snorkel.

They had bigger fins for me here than Curacao which was nice. I had some nice marks on my feet from the small fins I had with the sea lions. These were a size 13-14. I swam with the fish for about 45 minutes and had a blast. I took almost 200 pictures, unfortunately once I really got the knack for catching the fish the inside of my underwater bag’s lens fogged up some. I’ll see what I can salvage later. There was a bunch of giant blue fish that I think were parrot fish. I had one fish that looked like a blow fish type of fish that just stopped in front of me and looked like he was posing for me. I had a great time.

I finished my snorkeling and went over to the water park. It was really neat and very interactive. There were all types of lever and buttons to make water shoot all over the place. There were buckets that would fill up that you could turn over on unsuspecting victims below you. At the very top was a giant bucket that would fill up gradually then eventually overturn dumping hundreds of gallons of water over everyone beneath it.

I made my way to the top and asked which the best slide to ride was and was told the green tube. It was an entirely tubed ride so you couldn’t see where you were going until you got to the opening at the end. It was great. I climbed to the top again and took the blue slide. This time instead of just sitting down and scooching my rear end to the beginning of the slide I tried to do a cool looking swing from the bar over top of the slide to start. Unfortunately my giant upper torso didn’t help this process and I slammed my tail bone into the slide. I am writing this the next morning and my rear is still hurting.

I took some pictures of the island and stopped for Pepsi and talked with Alison and Linda about the day for awhile before we left. That concluded the tour after taking the boat back to the jeeps we drove back to Oranjestad. De Palms has a huge operation. I asked Jose and they had 20 Jeep Wranglers, 17 flatbed open air trucks and he didn’t even know the number of busses for touring. They did a good job on this tour and it was definitely worth $96 for a full day of fun.

I got back to the ship a little early and went to try and find dad to get an early jump and going to town. Of course as I was going up he had left early and gone down. I searched the whole ship before heading back outside where he was waiting where we had planned. He was way early in my defense. I finally met him at 3:45 PM and we weren’t supposed to meet until 4:15 PM to 4:30PM.

We walked to town and went to Diamonds International. Dad wanted to get something nice for mom and he really liked this stone called Ammolite. He wanted a pendant to put on the end of a gold chain she had on the ship that currently is adorned with an opal. We had a nice salesman and he showed us about 10 different Ammolite pendants. Mom has a thick chain so the smaller ones didn’t look right. I vetoed all that had a clasp thinking that she could easily lose them. We narrowed it down to one that mounted on a gold shell and one that had two stones and was mounted to look like a sailboat. The shell didn’t hang right originally but it had a few openings to thread the chain through and it looked perfect after switching the chain through a middle hole. So the gold shell mounted Ammolite stone is now in the Faunce jewelry collection.

As we were leaving dad started looking at watches where one caught his eye. One thing about dad is he has an uncanny knack for finding the most expensive thing in a shop. The watch was a limited edition Breitling watch that was being promoted with Bentley’s. The watch cost $83,000 but you got one free if you bought a specific Bentley.

We left Diamonds International and got to my souvenir shops and lower pricing. I bought a few things and we stopped at The Paddock bar for a drink before we headed back to the ship. Out side the bar they had a couple of girls dressed at Dutch Milk Maids even down to the wooden shoes. Dad asked and they confirmed that the wooden shoes really hurt.

We got back to the ship just in time to get ready for dinner. Alex and Maricel had rented a car for the day and they skipped dinner. Everyone seemed to have another fun day. For dinner I had fried shrimp, thinly carved roast duck for appetizers and salmon for dinner. Mom had a veal shank which I got a bite of that was really good. I had a very rich chocolate pudding for desert.

We met all of our table mates at the Palladium Theater for the night’s shows. The headliner was David Haines a magician. He was pretty good. I sat up front near Carol, John and the kids and got good views of everything. While talking to the audience he said everyone would ask him questions about the show and he had a list of the top five. Four of the five ended up being about his beautiful blonde assistant Alexa. We were all kind of shocked to find out she was only 19 years old.

One of his bits had him bring and older man on stage and dressing him like Harry Potter. The shirt had a place for David Haines to put his arm through and be the man’s arms so David Haines could perform the tricks. The man was pretty good and from my angle I could see the magician telling him what to do to make things funnier.

The grand finale had him in a box with 17 metal spikes over top. He had to escape in 45 seconds before the spikes fell. They pretended things were going bad and the spikes fell. Alexa opened the box and he was gone. He appeared at the back of the theatre standing on the table that mom had her wheelchair located. Clyde and Debbie said they saw him run in through the back of the stage. We all joked that even trying to just walk from the front of the stage to the back would take us longer than 45 seconds.

We all hung out together during the one bingo game they played before the Love and Marriage Game. I talked to Alison for awhile and she is just a really cool girl and very smart. We talked about winter break and how her birthday is January 4 and she always seems to go back to school on her birthday. I told her Matt was an honors math teacher and Alison apparently is taking those classes now. She’s 12 years old and will be taking geometry next year. I know I didn’t see geometry until I was in high school. Mom was talking with Eric and she just loves him. I know I’ve written it before but these are just two terrific kids.

John and Carol took them to bed before the Love and Marriage game as it was a little risqué. We were all kind of shocked to see some kids in attendance. While talking before the show Carol told me a few funny things she had heard on board. The first was the people in the Royal Suite are having all kinds of problems and having a terrible trip.

I don’t think I wrote this earlier but there was a morning at the beginning of the cruise where my toilet wouldn’t flush. Well strangely about 20 minutes after trying to flush and right before I was going to call about it and leave for the day the toiled flushed on its own. The same thing happened with John & Carol’s room and who knows how many. Carol found out that when all of the toilets finally flushed they backed up into the bathroom of the Royal Suite. They had a few other mishaps but it’s hard to top that.

Eric the cruise director aka Dale from Karaoke did a great job at the Love & Marriage Game. He even joked once that it’s amazing how his Dale persona comes out so often at the Love & Marriage Game. The had the newlyweds, Lisa and Scott, from my Sea Lion Swim on stage as they were the most recently married and a couple married 57 years on the stage with two other couples that had to go through various tests to get the crowds vote to be in the game.

I don’t want to write the whole show down but some highlights were the following. When asked where the most romantic place you made love and the older couple’s wife answered a private pool. The husband came back and answered a public pool. Eric had a whole lot of fun with that. When asked their wife’s bra size one guy just said 42 with no cup size. After everyone answered with cup sizes Eric came back and repeated all the other answers and asked him what was missing from his answer and he added a D. The funny part is the wife came back and answered 40 with no cup size. Eric almost couldn’t stop laughing and said he now understood the husband’s answer.

He had a good joke for this question. He said some had answered on a previous cruise that his wife had a Sheep Dog Bra. When asked what a Sheep Dog Bra was he explained a Sheep Dog Bra rounds them up and points them in the right direction. Overall it was a fun evening in the Palladium Theater. We said good night to John and Carol and headed to bed.

We get our hour back tonight that we lost on the first night of the cruise so I get another hour of sleep which I needed after the last to full days of getting up early and playing in the hot Caribbean sun.

Aruba Miscellaneous	Blow Hole	Blue Parrot Water Park
California Lighthouse	Bushiribana Gold Mine	Snorkeling On De Palm Island
Aruba Outback 4 X 4 Jeep Tour	Natural Bridge	Dinner In Great Gatsby Dining Room
Alto Vista Church	Casibari Boulders	David Haines Magic Show
Baby Bridge	De Palm Island	Ship Miscellaneous