Sunset, Full Moon

They call it “A Happy Place”. There are a lot of reasons. First, the weather is monotonously perfect. It’s like “Groundhog’s Day”. You wake up everyday and it’s sunny, with a bright blue sky, puffy clouds that look like big balls of cotton, temperature in the mid 80s, and a gentle breeze. The daily mean temperature is 82.6 degrees. The average low temperature is 78.6 degrees. Oh, and everyone is nice. The

housekeeping staff at the hotel, the waiters and waitresses, the bartenders, the cab drivers, the tour guides, the merchants, even the other guests at the hotels are nice when they are there. They may be miserable at home, but you can’t be unhappy here. Traffic stops for pedestrians, even if you don’t bother to cross at the crosswalks. Even though it’s a foreign country, everyone speaks English, along with Dutch, Spanish, and Papiamento, and of course, they gladly take the US dollar. It’s not heaven, but Aruba seems to be the next best thing. The creatures blend right in. The orange flamingoes prance around the beach, and stop to allow people to take pictures. The iguanas that would scare you at home silently slither under your beach lounge chair, and people think they’re cute.

Aruba is an autonomous part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands along with Curaçao and Sint Maarten (yes that’s spelled right). The name tells you something about the place. Aruba in Spanish comes from the words meaning “there was gold”, and there was at one time. In Indian, it means “well placed island”. You couldn’t find a better location. It’s in the southern Caribbean, 18 miles north of Venezuela, and it’s outside “Hurricane Alley”. It’s not very big, 69 square miles. Population is just over 100,000.

There is plenty to do, both indoors and outdoors. From casinos, to parasailing, to off road UTV tours, which we tried. All the dust you can eat through rugged, winding terrain that looks like the middle of the Arizona desert with cactus and a view of the ocean. But, maybe the biggest attraction is the state of mind it creates. You get away from the fridgid weather and the poisonous politics we find ourselves surrounded by at home. You have brief encounters with people who remind you of home. The obnoxious Patriot fan who has a very pleasant wife. You sit down in a casino next to a woman who lived in the Manayank neighborhood of Philadelphia for four years. The guy on the boat from Nashville whose son is studying in New Jersey. Oh yeah, where? Princeton, he’s getting his PhD in mechanical engineering. I would have led with that.

We ended our vacation with a sunset tour. The catamaran glided along the coast, with an open bar, finger foods, all the people who were there to get out of the cold, and the dancing bartender. As the sun slowly sank on the western horizon, it was as if you could see for a thousand miles. The water glistened streaks of blue and aquamarine. The breeze was strong and there was music playing, but there wasn’t much talking. Sunsets happen every night, everywhere in the world. It is a light only nature can shine that makes us feel it’s overwhelming power, and our small place in it. As the sun slid below the horizon, the blue sea turned black in the dusk. I looked overhead to see the full moon. The guardian to see us through the night until we completed our spin and welcomed the sun again in the warmth of Aruba and icy cold of home.