Aruba: Day 3

​Today we woke up with no alarms. I’d had the foresight to cold brew some coffee yesterday, so I poured it through the drip machine and we had iced coffee. Then, I made us bacon and scrambled eggs for breakfast. We ate and cleaned up, and got ourselves ready to head out. Our camera strap had broken the previous day so we set out to find a new one. We biked downtown and stopped along the way at The Coffee Table. There’s always room for more coffee. I got a regular iced coffee and I got a vanilla latte. They were both really good. We sat a while in the café, just relaxing with not much to do. Eventually, we cashed out and continued downtown towards the cruise ports. There was a ship docked today. We’re always in awe at the sheer size of those behemoths.

We wandered through the outdoor shopping mall until we found a couple electronics stores. We found three different strap options. The first one neither of us really liked and we already have it back at home, so we passed. The second one was just like the one we broke, and we prefer this style. But it was way too expensive at $70. Also the piece that we broke is still stuck in the camera, so we would need to remove that first but we don’t have pliers. Thanks TSA. The third one was only $10 but we weren’t convinced that it would be sturdy enough for our camera. So we decided to purchase nothing and just carry the camera by hand or in our bag. We also decided we should head back to our room and apply more sunblock. It was just in time too. The downtown area was quickly becoming overrun with cruisers.

Once back at the AirBnB we slathered on sunscreen, packed a small bag and hopped on the bikes and pedaled over to the beach. We met with our people and hung out in the water for a while.
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Since all of the cool kids seemed to be doing it, I opted to go for a ride with 5 other people on a tube thing, towed behind a boat around the beach area. It was more like a couch than a tube. It was pretty fun, but easy to stay on, so I dragged my feet in the water for kicks. We hit a wave, and my leg plunged a lot deeper into the water. The sudden increase in drag sucked me off the tube and I had to get picked up. I got hassled a little bit. When I did it again, everyone else was annoyed, so I behaved after that. After, we all hung out in the water a while longer until we were feeling inclined towards dinner.

We showered off the salt and redressed ourselves. We regrouped at the hotel shortly thereafter, and shared a cab toward California Lighthouse. We’d heard there were good sunset photo opportunities here, as it’s situated on the western point of the island. Unfortunately, even though we had arrived before sunset, the sun had already disappeared behind some distant clouds, so what we got wasn’t as good as we had hoped. Oh well, we had dinner reservations at Faro Blanco anyway, so it wasn’t a total waste! We were seated outside and we enjoyed the lovely live music. I ordered tortellinis with chicken in a wine sauce. The name was wicked Italian, I forget what it was actually called. I got the fusilli. The pasta wasn’t quite up to the new standards we set when we went to Italy, but it was good, and the rest was great. After dinner, we caught a cab back home, and we pretty much crashed immediately. We were exhausted, probably from being in the sun all day.