“Aruba, Jamaica… Oooh, I want to take ya…”
Bet that’ll be stuck in your head for the rest of the day/night!

Family vacation in this beautiful place was wonderful. Hot, definitely hot, like 90 degrees hot, and windy (so you would think you wouldn’t feel as if you were melting..) but MAN that sun was intense! Perfect for getting a perfect tan. 🙂
I have to say that being a beached whale is one of my personal favorite things to do, and at the all-inclusive Divi Tamarijn the rooms are right on the sand and the cool ocean is literally four steps away. That, was the best part. We had some hiccups along the way, it started with my broken duffle bag the second I went to step out of my house.. Then we had the screaming child upstairs once we got to the Divi who we could hear the entire afternoon because of an open balcony door, and perhaps another one was the construction going on during our ‘relaxing vacation’.. And maaaaaybe another thing was that the food wasn’t as good as we were led to believe(it became a joke between us all that my food was going to come out the worst, which it did every, time!!!), BUT, as always, we found the silver lining along the way. That’s what my family does, we find the bright side.
We got to see awesome reefs, different fish than what we have here in Florida, we swam through some wrecks off shore and we got to experience a different culture with Indian and Dutch influence. We found an amazing little spot called “Westdeck” that was right on the water with the friendliest staff and extremely chill decor – it’s one of those places where you can bring your catch if you’ve gone fishing and they’ll cook it for you however you’d like. We also enjoyed dinner at LG Smith’s Steakhouse; my pork chop was the best thing I had eaten the entire vacation. Another cool thing we did was drive around the entire island, from top to bottom (it’s only 20 miles from the southernmost to the northernmost point, and only 6 miles wide!), laughing the entire ride to the stone bridge, the ostrich farm, the Lighthouse.. Great times.
Lots of inside jokes along the way, lots of memories made. I hadn’t traveled with my brother out of Florida in over 8 years so I was extremely grateful for that opportunity.
If you get a chance to vacation in Aruba, you should. There are plenty of markets to shop at for trinkets, plenty of beautiful views, a great Lighthouse to go to, along with friendly people and a pretty safe atmosphere.
These photos were taken with a waterproof Nikon CoolPix camera that I bought specifically for the trip. They came out better than I thought they would. Woo!