Aruba!
So I just got back from my third Caribbean Island in six months to Hurricane-free Aruba.
One of the reasons I changed my business model is so I wouldn’t have to do what a lot of travel agents do. A lot of agents either bad mouth AirBNB, VRBO and the like or… pretend they do not exist.
Do I love fine Hotels? YES! I really do for a list of reasons and it’s how I prefer to travel for the most part. However, there are circumstances where a Vacation rental is a better option and here are some.
A large family traveling that wants to spend time together. The larger the family the harder it is to find hotel options where the entire family can spend downtime together privately. A big house, with a big dinner table and a big living room is much easier to do with a vacation home.
When it comes to fine hotels, some places don’t have them or just don’t have very many of them. In Travel (as in all real estate) Location is KING. Taking the lovely port town of Rijeka, if you want a really nice place to stay in the old Korzo, it’s apartment, otherwise there is a very nice resort 15 minutes outside of town. Iceland? Outside of Reyjavik, nearly every really nice place is a vacation rental.. The list goes on and on. Some destinations skew so heavily the other way around that the hotels compete heavy and the value is insanely good and that makes sense. Aruba Isn’t one of those places. I love the Ritz, Hyatt Regency and the Bucuti, but none of those hotels are hotels I’d travel to just to stay at, they are just the best places on Aruba.
Sometimes you don’t want to be with the other tourists and want to be around locals. So, you obviously can’t do this anywhere. There are places in the world that if you forget your privileged status as an international tourist, you’ll likely get robbed and that’s a best case scenario. However, some places, staying with the locals is nice and refreshing and Aruba is one.
So my Mother In Law came to me about this trip and we wanted to do a Dive trip. I originally wanted to push in Indonesia, but my Brother in Law had a week maximum and with just a week in North America, we have to stay close. Some family members had budgets to hit and the primary focus of this trip, for her, was scuba diving. My first job in Travel was in a company that did a TON of Caribbean and I didn’t go back to the Caribbean in over 20 years and now, Aruba is my third island in 6 months. I also hadn’t been diving in a long time and so. I decided to get recertified. The Scuba diving went pretty darn well.
Weather-wise, for a weather snob like me. June is starting to push it for the Caribbean and Mexico. By July, we have a mounting hurricane risk that doesn’t go away until November (we used to say August-September, thanks global warming) However, even aside from that, it just starts getting hotter and wetter than I’d like.
BUT, as many of you probably know, Aruba is out of the Hurricane belt and even tropical storms are rare. It’s a desert island and this is part of why it’s only forests consist of cacti, this is also why it and the other ABC island (with Bonaire and Curacao) have a longer tourist season than most of the Caribbean. Also, rivers, streams and the like are terrible for diving visibility, so while there are better places for diving than the ABC’s, it’s pretty darn good.
We ended up staying down in Savaneta so close to one of the best reefs on the island that I could’ve thrown a ball from our front yard into the water. Friends, it doesn’t matter how much money you spend on Eagle Beach, you can’t get that close to the water despite how popular it is. We also found where the locals ate.
One of the most amazing things that happened is that my daughter fell in love with a SWEET stray cat and her nana (my wife’s mother) decided to adopt her. My MIL asked me if it was “crazy?” and my first thought was “Yes, probably.” Because in my experience, bringing in an animal from overseas, especially without a lot of preparation…. Usually doesn’t work… at best. However, like I’m always saying, “In travel, never assume anything.” I checked it out, due diligence and I am always ready to be surprised.
And I was!
It turns out bringing a pet back from rabies-free Aruba with US customs being cleared right there at the airport is much easier than I thought and now Mittens has a home in Wisconsin.
I likely will be posting about Aruba for some time, but mostly via Instagram and some via Facebook. Some more things may find their way to a blog or a newsletter. A lot of the content there is more personalized and will even cover nights out locally and family camping trips.
