harryfat1

The final stop of this whirlwind tour of the North part of Aruba island is Arashi Beach. It’s not the most well-known beach in Aruba, that would be Eagle Beach. Arashi Beach is more north and has more waves than the other beaches and not as smooth sand as the other beaches but since it’s part of the tour, you don’t have the option to select the beach you want. But I think most beaches in Aruba have enough of the “wow” factor anyway if you just present a picture of the beach to an average person. Just be glad to be able to feel the warm waters in December when most of the US and Canada are stuck in the cold weather. Looking back at the lighthouse from the beach area

Before I continued on with the trip report, I realized I forgot to include the day 5 cruise compass. No one reminded me. I don’t know if people don’t care to read it as they have the phone app but here it is for the quiet silent crowd lurking in the back that wanted but was too shy to speak up I’m only uploading the JPEG file scans. If anyone wants a PDF file to print hard copies at home (you are the person after my own heart), leave a message here and I will scan it in PDF for people to print at home as PDF printouts are much easier to read than JPEG files. A couple of things worth mentioning on page one are: 1) We go back to Florida time after Aruba so we set our watches/phones back 1 hour before going to sleep 2) I was supposed to tell the Odyssey folks by noon on the phone app on day 5about on our departure info on day 9 so they can issue us the correct luggage tag. Did I do that? Don’t be silly, of course not. I wonder how many people read that paragraph and did it before the deadline. I know I didn’t. I mean, how many people are thinking about their cruises ending at day 5 noon of an 8-day cruise? Oh, well…

I typically opt for an island tour on a first-time visit to a new island just to see what are the highlights of that island. Then if we go back again, we will just go to one or two places that we liked. My tour preference is similar to Windjammer Buffet – give me a little of everything but not a lot of one thing as I will be bored after a while of the same scenery. I vacation through my camera/phone so I need a constant change of background to keep my ADHD personality from getting bored and feel like I am getting my money's worth in seeing as many places as possible. Yeah, no need to rent a car as the midtown hotel charges $80/night to park a car. No, thank you.

Very nice to go back to the ship on the catamaran. I’m not surprised by the similarity between various tours as you saw from all of the stops there were tour buses everywhere so many of the tour companies offer overlapping destinations.

I didn’t notice you guys dropped in the comments in between my uploads last night until today. NYC is pretty compact in the Manhattan area where all the tourist traps are. We are staying in midtown so it’s somewhat close to where most of the sights we want to see during our visit. Going to the furthest south at the edge of Staten Island Ferry terminal is less than 7 miles going south and going north to mid-way of Central Park is less than 4 miles. So we won't be in the subway for too many stops most of the days. We will venture off to Brooklyn by walking across the bridge but coming back via the subway. I have been watching native New Yorkers tips on Subway so I have a basic understanding of subway usage. I took the SF subway (BART) to work for 5 years when I used to work in the downtown SF Financial District as a young accountant so public transit is not a foreign thing to me. These are few tips I learned from watching various videos: 1 – Don’t ride past 10 PM as that’s when the weirdos show up 2 – If everyone is avoiding one car within a train, there is a reason. Either it smells bad or there’s someone in there people don’t want to be on the train with them. The suggestion is to move to another car or wait for another train 3 – Know that going North is uptown and going south is downtown. Don’t go by the color of the train as they can split off. Know the train by number or letters and the direction they are going 4 – Some smaller stations must be entered on the correct side of the street as it’s going one way only. We learned that in taking the Boston subway years ago post-cruise. We ended up on the wrong side of the subway and had to ride it down a couple of stations before we could cross back 5 – Get a copy of the subway map ahead of time 6 – The basic etiquette of subway riding everywhere like not blocking the way for people to exit

View of the beach where we will be going next as the last stop of this tour

Looking at the hotels of Aruba along the beach area

You can pay $5 to go up the narrow staircase to go up to the top of the lighthouse. I saw the video on YouTube and the view was just OK so didn’t feel compelled to pay the money but someone from our tour did go up. It would be a rushed trip anyway as we didn’t stop here for too long By then it was 12:30 and it was another hot day in the Caribbean (there are no cold Caribbean days, right?) so many people lined up to get drinks instead of going up the Lighthouse. Let’s see here - $5/pp to go up the narrow stairs in the heat or $5 to buy something to cool you off? I think the line tells you what many people chose

OK, done with the Chapel. Up next on this whirlwind tour of northern Aruba is the California Lighthouse. The Lighthouse was erected after the ship SS California sunk off the coast in the late 1800s. It’s supposed to be the tallest structure in Aruba situated in the North part of the island. Oh, hey, look, there are more tour buses. Fancy that...

Huge Cacti This dude sells Cuban Cigars on top of coconuts

This Chapel is a main stop for many sightseers as well as worshipers and it draws a whole lot of vendors Many people visiting their crazy aunt in the basement this morning (aka shopping). Hey, kids, I know you wanted the new game for the Xbox for Christmas but Grandma lost some money at the casino last night on the ship so she’s a little short on cash. How about a cheap T-shirt from Aruba that you will never wear instead of cash for your game? 🤪

Ok, done with the abandoned mine area as we checked all the body parts are still intact as we now go off to the next area – Alto Vista Chapel All these cacti remind me of Arizona Here's the Chapel

Made it back down in one piece I spotted a resident of the area

It’s somewhat scenic at the top but not sure if it was worth the climb amidst all the people Similar to the previous attraction where going up was much harder than coming down as you can just come down a slope. In theory, you probably could have just walked up the hill on the side instead of risking the climb inside the abandoned mine but I guess that takes the "fun" out of it

Walking and the infamous NYC subway. Been watching lots of videos on the NYC subway. We spent almost 3 weeks in Japan taking subways and trains but of course, that country is much safer and cleaner than NYC but it's a similar idea of walking around a concrete jungle. Will be planning to walk in the morning before it gets too hot and indoor activities/ferry rides in the afternoons to cool off

My wife taking a picture of us from the other side And I took a picture of her Yeah, they would never have this back home as it's just a lawsuit waiting to happen as you know someone will be injured from this climb and the lawyers would be all over themselves filing lawsuits...

There’s no tour guide or anything resembling an organized climbing effort. It’s like letting loose 100 monkeys into a house and everyone is going every which way. Yeah, climb at your own risk...

One more picture of the Casibari rocks from the bus as we move onto the next stop – Bushiribana Old Mine Ruins This was an abandoned gold mine from many years ago and it’s somehow a big visiting site with tons of people climbing the ruins. I think this must be a big ATV roundup place as there are probably over 100 ATVs in the area along with all the bus tours

I briefly thought about a cruise out of NYC a while back but the itinerary didn’t appeal to me as it would take me south to FL and the Bahamas where my brain would melt in the August heat. Not to mention we already did 2 cruises in 2023 and one more upcoming this December, the family will bulk if I opt for more cruises. We like cruises in general but that’s not our only form of vacationing as we have road trips that span 2,000+ miles round trip in the west coast. Easier to just do a one-week land trip to NYC to see as much as we can. Then plan for a future December cruise where we will come back to see the Holiday lights of NYC and freeze our buns off as the West Coast stores don't sell clothes that are East Coast winter-ready. Nice view of the Statue at sunset

Thanks for the concern. Our area didn’t get hit too badly from this series of storms but from the news report, other areas did. https://www.yahoo.com/news/part-los-angeles-could-see-065102556.html I think Viator probably has a solid record on getting most of the tours out without glitches as they have 4.4 stars out of 5 out of 77K+ reviews on Google so they are decent. It’s just the odds of things going wrong increase every time you have a middle person passing on the traveler info and you are dependent on how organized the local tour operators are.. We have one more set of rocks to climb at the next stop on the tour and that one is even more challenging to go up

Good thing you didn’t stumble onto some hard labor bus where they take you to some field and make you do manual labor in the Caribbean heat. I guess the person whose spot you took was cursing out the tour operator as he/she was still at the cruise terminal waiting for their ride. That’s the drawback of online tours is that some are lazy about who they pick up. All you are is a headcount to them. They are employed to pick up X number that day and as long as the number is right, they don’t care if is that the correct group or not. At least with the ship-based tour, you meet at the theater somewhere and they issue you a group number sticker that you put on your shirt (i.e. group 7) to at least know you are with the right group. Like in the picture below - you just need to find the number and you are set.

Oh, yeah, you have to pay like $2 to use their restroom as my wife and my son were in line to pay. So have some small bills with you as you travel to pay for restroom use. From what they told me, there's no toilet paper inside the restroom so you have to bring some sort of paper Kleenex in your backpack to do your business...

We made it down early and here’s our bus as well as the little store down at the entrance area