I’ve decided to start a new thread on this since we were getting so many pictures involved that I would hate to have everyone need to download them all to see a few new ones every few days. I’m also going to be a little more detailed with our activities / opinions since I’ll be passing this thread along as a trip report to some of the Aruba BB’s for others to plan their trip with … much of what we’ve decided to do was based on other reports in the past, so we’ll try repay the favor and perhaps touch on some things that I haven’t seen mentioned.

I believe we last left you on Wednesday night … talking about those stupid nickel slots that seem to pay us more than the quarters. After the $200 win the other night, I followed with another $150 at the Allegro’s Casino this time around.



So far that has been our fave place to gamble … it seemed to be a lot more jovial atmosphere than either the Wyndham’s Casino or certainly the Excelsior. We also noticed the opportunity for drinks came around a lot more often as well.

As I also stated before, Thursday turned out to be a shopping day for us as the weather wasn’t the best (a sprinkle here and there and plenty of clouds). We drove down to the waterfront of Oranjestad and cruised the open-air shops and a few of the malls:



A pretty busy place, people watching was half the fun and there were some neat buildings down in the area:



You could buy T-shirts for 3 for $10 at a lot of places, but they were of pretty low quality … the nicer shirts were always about $15. We didn’t haggle much, but we saw a few that did with success.

We also decided to go check out the marina to see where we’d be going fishing on Saturday … glad we did since there was the largest concentration of Iguanas that we’ve seen yet by the Seaport Casino … a little tamer here, you could sit and toss food to them without them scurrying away:



Also got a chance to see a bunch of the crabs playing tug-o-war with fish scraps from the fishing boats:



There was also a Siberian Tiger there that you could pet and get your pic with, but our timing wasn’t good on the opportunity to do so, so we just snapped one pic through the glass:



We left the downtown area to go up to the Mill Resort (a ways from the beach if any of you are considering that) that is located next to the old Windmill (a reminder of the Dutch ties here):



We wanted to check out a shop called the Juggling Fish … nothing special, and more expensive than the downtown shops, but we found a couple of nice hats that we bought for about $15 each.

We got some Florins from an ATM machine so we could hit the local grocery store, but it didn’t look like we needed to once we got there. We bought a couple of the $10 Ventaha phone cards back to the states, but had trouble using them from most phones … but the rates were good if you found a phone to take them.

Incredible fruits in the stores … check out these papayas!!!!!!!!!!