Last year my parents offered to take us on a family trip for Christmas instead of giving us gifts. Without hesitation, we all signed on for a trip to Riviera Maya, Mexico. And since last year’s trip was so much fun, we decided to do away with gifts again this year and take a family trip to Aruba.
We decided on Aruba because a friend of my mom’s vacations there every year and absolutely loves it. My mom did all the planning (she should seriously be a travel agent, she’s that good) and we packed our bags and left Iowa behind.
So here’s the deal. It doesn’t rain in Aruba. I mean, they get about 20 inches of rain per year. So we weren’t too concerned that we were going during the island’s rainy season. But the day we arrived it was pouring and we could tell it had been for some time. Since they don’t get much rain, they don’t have handy things like gutters on the road, which made for a fairly adventurous cab ride from the airport to the hotel.
Our hotel was awesome, by the way. We stayed at the Marriott Surf Club and it would be my first choice if we went back again. The hotel is right on the beach with several pools and a lazy river, and it’s within walking distance to some great places to eat.
So since it was raining and we didn’t get to our hotel until around 6 pm, we didn’t really do anything the first night. We were all pretty tired from the five hour flight anyway.
Unfortunately we woke up on Sunday to more clouds and a few rain showers here and there. We headed out to the beach anyway and only had to run for cover a few times. One particularly long rain shower forced us into the hot tub to keep warm. But I’ll take pouring rain in a hot tub in Aruba over snow and ice in Iowa any day.
The rain cleared off that evening so we ventured to a restaurant on the beach not too far from our hotel. The Pelican’s Nest is on a dock over the ocean and the coconut shrimp was delicious. If there weren’t so many restaurants to try out we would have gone back for sure.
On our way back from the Pelican’s Nest, we stopped in to a hopping bar next door to our hotel called Moomba Beach. Later we found out that it was only busy because the flooded roads prevented people from going into town. But we sure had a great time! Maybe a little too good because the next day was rough.
Luckily all that was on our agenda for day three was lounging around on the beach some more. And the sun was finally shining. I think we were all a little anxious to soak up every last bit of sun because we kept thinking it would rain again at any minute. We didn’t get any more rain and our overzealousness on the tanning front caused the first in a series of mean sunburns.
That night we walked through the shops and restaurants across the street from our hotel. In the middle of the shops was a stage with a fountain in the background. Like a baby Bellagio. Throughout the night, there were dancers and water shows choreographed to the Calypso music (that link is to the song that our cab driver sang for us on our way to the airport). We ate dinner at a place called Taste of Belgium, which wasn’t all that tasty. And we walked around and checked out all of the vendors’ wares before calling it a night.
So on Tuesday we went to the beach again. Surprised? And then took the bus into Oranjestad for dinner. We went to an Argentinian restaurant called El Gaucho and had some delicious steaks. We shared meals and still had too much food.
The next day we finally switched it up and took an ATV tour of the island. We took so many pictures that I’ll have to make another post about that experience. We still managed to get some beach time in after we returned from roaming around on our ATVs. That evening we had reservations at the Driftwood, so we cleaned up and took the bus back into Oranjestad. This was absolutely my favorite meal of the week. I had the Seafood Pasta Thermidor and it was amazing! Joel spent most of his meal drooling over my plate full of lobster, clams, shrimp and pasta.
On Thursday we spent the day at the pool. And spent most of our time trying to lure the iguanas that roamed freely throughout the area. We ate at Wacky Wahoo’s which came highly recommended from almost everyone we met at the resort. The food was great but it didn’t top my seafood pasta. After dinner we stopped in at Smokey Joe’s to watch the Colts redeem themselves after their loss to Dallas on Sunday.
Friday was our last full day in Aruba so we staked out some lounges on the beach again to soak up every last drop of sun before heading back to Iowa. We were so set on not missing a minute that we ordered food from the pool instead of heading up to the room to eat. And luckily we did because we might have missed out on the awesome calamari rings!
For our last night in Aruba, we climbed aboard the Kukoo Kunuku bus for a bar crawl around the island. If you’re ever in Aruba, I would definitely get in on this (although you could probably skip out on the dinner and eat somewhere a little more tasty before jumping on the bus). We stopped at four different bars and had our water bottles filled with our favorite concoctions. There was line dancing, dancing on the bars, dancing along with a Michael Jackson look-a-like, dancing to Aruba’s favorite song and, of course, lots and lots of laughter. It was the perfect ending to our trip!
