Mi stima Aruba! (part 3)

Continued from Part 2:

Our original plan on Friday had been to drive down to Baby Beach on the south side of the island, but since we had given up on renting a car, we decided to take a bus north to Boca Catalina instead. I’d read that there was good snorkeling there, and we were able to borrow masks and snorkels from Olivier, so we seemed all good to go. As an amusing little side note, as we walked up to the Marriott, a young man in a car driving by shouted “Get some sun, baby!”, presumably at me and my white legs. Little did he know that parts of me covered by a t-shirt and shorts were already a lovely shade of pink!

This was where the slight difficulty with the buses came in. Essentially, the bus stops are only one side of the road, indicating that they primarily travel south. The concierge confirmed that we could pick up a bus going north by just standing on the corner, but we had no idea when it would come. As it turns out, they don’t come by all that often. Tour buses kept whizzing by, and one bus on an alternate route stopped to chat, but our bus was nowhere to be found. It was hot, and we were carrying a loaded backpack and towels, sitting in the scrub brush on the side of a busy road for at least half an hour. Not ideal.

But, lo and behold, at last the bus came, and delivered us to relaxing Boca Catalina.

It was much smaller than Palm Beach, with rougher sand and no real facilities, aside from a few palapas which were already occupied when we got there, and a guy renting chairs. However, we managed to find a nice shady spot under a tree to kick back and relax. Andy took the opportunity to tease a bunch of tiny lizards with bits of cheese, which came back, literally, to bite him (no worries, they were just nibbling).

Snorkeling there was fun, although it was mostly just little fishies.

An older gentleman was nice enough to tell us that there was a starfish out in the water somewhere, too, which Andy had fun hunting down.

I also managed to scrape my foot hard enough on one of the hidden rocks to draw a pretty decent amount of blood. Don’t you just love all your injuries to be covered in salt water, sand, and tiny lizards?

The bus driver had told us that the last pickup from Boca Catalina was at 8:30, so we were all packed up and ready to go around 6-ish, but no dice. We waited. And waited. And waited. Finally we started walking south on our own, and at last got picked up by a 7 o’clock bus. He dropped us off at the resort, then we started off at a brisk pace to try to make it to the big market before 8. As luck would have it, we got a bit turned around and had to do a big loop to get there, again with no sidewalks, no streetlights, and lots of thorn bushes reaching out for us, but at last we made it, and even on time.

Back at the villa, Andy whipped us up a lovely batch of angel hair pasta and a jar of Prego, and we jammed to more of the same tunes, courtesy of our loud Brazilian friends. Andy now does a passable rendition of Last Friday Night (TGIF), thanks to them.

Our Saturday was again spent with much walking. First to a Thai place we wanted to try called Sawasdee. Arriving there, we discovered they were only open for dinner. Blah. We further discovered almost every restaurant in that area is only open for dinner. Double blah. At last we came across a little snack stand selling cheap food. Great, except that we didn’t know what most of it was. We wanted to be adventurous, but the girl at the counter didn’t speak enough English to tell us what was what. Andy ended up with a steak sandwich and I had a Johnny cake with chicken, both of which were pretty delish. Then I went off to the horribly over-priced first aid shop to spend our life’s savings on waterproof bandaids for my scraped foot.

We dropped by the Excelsior for more sports betting fun, then wandered to the nearest bus stop to wait, once again, for a bus going north so that we could try out another good snorkeling beach. Again, it took forever, but did eventually show up. This driver was super helpful in explaining that buses only came by Arashi beach five minutes before the hour. At little farther south, they came by twice an hour, and farther south yet (down by the resorts), they came every fifteen minutes or so. Good stuff to keep in mind.

He dropped us off at the beach, but we first wanted to explore an island landmark called the California Lighthouse. Luckily a friendly young Aruban guy got off the bus at the same time we did, and he showed us a shortcut (through a broken old fence, into a desert landscape, past a million thorn bushes, up 5000 stairs and out of a French restaurant). You can’t go up inside anymore, but even from the bottom, the view is fantastic.

As we walked back down, we lost track of the path a bit and our shortcut got a little longer, but luckily we found our way back down without too much trouble. And I saw a tiny owl! It was precious.

We found a spot under a tree at Arashi beach, which was quite a bit bigger and busier than Boca Catalina had been, even though they are right next to each other. We did a bit more snorkeling too, and discovered some pretty awesome bigger fishies.

Arashi had a nice divi divi tree, too!

When the sun started to head its way down, we hopped onto the bus and went back to our room to get cleaned up, then walked to Sawasdee for dinner. Andy loved it, but my dish was a little light on the veggies for my taste. Not bad, though.

We finished dinner about 7:30, then walked to another bus stop, hoping we would catch one just in time to go to the Tivoli Light Parade, a super cool part of Carnival where all the dancers’ costumes are covered in little lights so they show up in the dark. At least four different people that day told us that we should definitely go to the parade, and that it started at 8. Yeah, well. We waited and waited and waited for a bus, but no dice. Only one came by, and it was full and wouldn’t stop. Finally we offered to split a cab with a couple from South Jersey. We didn’t get to Oranjestad until 9:30, but by that point we weren’t too worried, since some other folks at the bus stop told us they had heard it would take at least a couple hours for the parade to actually get downtown. So, we staked out a nice little spot on a bridge in front of the Renaissance hotel and did some people watching while we waited. This was pretty entertaining, from cute Spanish-speaking families sitting next to us to energetic Aruban kids running amok in the street to intoxicated elderly Americans wandering aimlessly to scantily clad young women of every nationality prancing around. I also saw about 50 different people wearing shirts that said “I ♥ My Body” (which I never got any explanation for) and we jammed along to some more of “today’s greatest dance hits” which some DJ had going down the block (our Brazilian friends would have been in music heaven). Best of all, Andy’s commentary on all this was cracking me up.

Anyway, this was all well and good until about 10 o’clock, when there was still no parade in sight and we started getting a little antsy. Eleven o’clock rolled around, and still nothing. Before we knew it was midnight, and believe it or not, STILL no parade! Plenty of wandering people though. Andy wanted to leave, but I wouldn’t let him. He fell into a pit of despair. I took a picture to prove it:

At long long long last, the first set of dancers arrived! It was awesome to see these huge groups of dancers in beautiful costumes, followed by their bands playing really loud (but fun) music from buses.

The people on either side of us were being really annoying by insisting on getting their pictures taken with everybody who walked by, but we couldn’t resist getting a few ourselves.

We decided to call it quits at 2:30 am, and the parade wasn’t even over then! This time we shared a cab with a sweet older Chilean couple, and they even covered the fare for us! It feels so good to meet nice, interesting, generous people.

Needless to say, we didn’t get up real early the next morning, but we also didn’t want to just lie in bed and waste those last precious moments of Aruban sunshine. So I parked myself under the pucalpa in the courtyard of the villa and cracked open my book. The really sad thing was that I was sunburnt from the day before and had to keep moving my chair around to remain in the shade. Other than that, the weather was absolutely perfect. Eventually the other Punta Salinas guests (Canadians) came out to enjoy some poolside time, too, and we all got to chatting. [As a side note, if you're more interested in meeting foreigners than in actually traveling the world, just go to Aruba. I guarantee you can make the acquaintance of folks from at least 20 different European or South American countries within a day.] A quick dip in the pool, a shower, some packing, and suddenly it was time to go. Sad, sad, sad.

One bright note, though, was that as Olivier drove us to the airport using the back roads (to avoid the Children’s Parade that was happening at the same time), we saw a herd of goats in the road! I don’t know why, but that just made me happy. We had seen stray dogs all week long, and even once several chickens wandering through the streets, but goats are way better than that. Although the iguana we saw in the beachside bar was also pretty awesome…naw, the goats win it.

In the blink of an eye, we were at the airport, on the plane, and headed home. To the snow. But like I said before,  I can’t be bitter, knowing we had such an awesome time on the “Happy Island.”

Ayo, Aruba!

Mi stima Aruba! (part 2)

Continued from Part 1:

There were a few downers Wednesday. For one thing, the free internet at our villa stopped connecting to Andy’s laptop, so we had to resort to paying for a day’s worth of access at the Marriott. For another thing, I had gotten a bit sunburned the day before, as I invariably knew I would, though only on my back – the rest of me, having been coated with Coppertone Sport SPF 50 [affiliate link], was still lily white. To make matters worse, my legs had also gotten eaten up by mosquitoes. White legs with red spots are not terribly attractive in a swimsuit. But like I said before, I chose not to be self-conscious all week long, and Andy didn’t mind paying for internet so much when he found he had won the NCAA basketball bets he’d excitedly placed at the Holiday Inn Excelsior Casino.

So we took our sandwiches, snacks, pineapple juice, and bottle of duty-free mango rum back to Palm Beach, where we snagged a couple of Marriott chairs (and somehow managed to avoid getting questioned about it) and chilled under a palm tree. So nice, so nice.

When dinnertime rolled around, we headed to a restaurant called Salt and Pepper, since it seemed to be reasonably priced and I had wanted to try tapas for a long time. It was located in the high-rise district, which was kind of a long walk for us, in the dark, without great sidewalks, but we made it in one piece. I really enjoyed all of the little dishes we tried (piri piri chicken, bacon mushrooms, fried brie, aioli with bread, chorizo, onion rings and a side salad), although Andy was not terribly impressed, mostly, I think, because we didn’t get an extraordinary amount of food for the price.

And then it was Thursday. Ah, Thursday. Thursday had a very, very rough start. We had to be at the Marriott, a good 10 minute walk, before 8:30 am to make arrangements to pick up the rental car we had reserved. This is the one point where it would have been very helpful to have rented a cell phone, because we had a difficult time contacting the company. The nice concierge let Andy use the hotel phone to call twice, until he finally got hold of someone who told us that we would have to wait at least 30 more minutes for the car. Grrr. The time goes by, Andy calls again only to find out that they don’t have a car available for us. At all. This was a huge disappointment, as it severely interfered with our plans to explore the island.

But, God was good, and our day wasn’t ruined. Instead of driving around downtown Oranjestad, we just took a bus. The Aruban bus system is pretty good, although they could use some help with signage and pamphlets and so on. There’s just not a lot of explanation anywhere of how it all works, though once you figure it out, it’s pretty easy. Luckily the drivers all speak pretty good English and are very helpful. And it only costs $2.60, round trip!

Unfortunately, the day was scorching hot. We wanted to walk down to the restaurant where we had made dinner reservations, but (my 2nd Aruban gripe) we couldn’t find a decent map for love nor money. Once we got the vaguest idea of where it actually was, we realized it was too far to walk. But we did at least get to pick up a few little knickknack souvenirs and see a few of the charming sights of downtown.

Before we caught the bus back to the resort, I bought a package of banana chips and a ham and egg sandwich from a street vendor. At under $5, this was a pretty cheap meal, and was surprisingly yummy.

At last, totally exhausted, we made it back to our place, just in time to get cleaned up again and walk back to the Marriott. (If, walking back and forth across the island, I didn’t manage to burn off all the calories I ate that day, then the world is officially unfair.) This time we took a taxi all the way back to downtown Oranjestad. The driver took us down a strangely unpaved road right next to a brand-new park, and dropped us off at Barefoot Restaurant, where we had made reservations far in advance for our one big splurge: a nice sunset dinner on the beach.

We each sipped a cocktail (I think an Aruba Ariba and a Barefoot Delight) while we nibbled on the scrumptious black olive-tomato-garlic tapenade with rolls they provided, as well as the absolutely fabulous beef carpaccio we ordered as an appetizer.

For the entrée, Andy had stuffed pork tenderloin with a glass of pinot noir and I had Caribbean grouper perfectly paired with a Mâcon Lugny. Mmmmmmm. I even devoured the veggies mine came with, and I’m usually not a big fan of cooked carrots or cauliflower. But when they prepare them with such love (and such a generous helping of butter), it’s hard to resist.

We finished it all off with the beautiful Grand Dessert, a sampling of five delectable treats. They were, in order of our general preference: chocolate mousse, vanilla ice cream, coffee crème brûlée, chocolate brownie, and Amaretto peach cheese cake. Pretty much all to die for.

Our servers were just perfect, too – exceedingly pleasant and obliging. You might think they would get irritated with tourists always wanting snapshots in front of the ocean, but to the contrary they were all quick to grab the camera with a smile. Luc, one of the owners and the maître d’, even directed us to pose for a silhouette kissing shot and brought us a frame magnet to use with it when we got home.

In short, it was worth every penny.

To cap off the evening, we even made it home in time to take a quick dip in the pool before bed. Andy spent a good 15 minutes searching for the back massaging mechanism with no luck, but Olivier and his wife Mily came home shortly afterwards and flipped a magic switch for us. The pool bubbled up like a jacuzzi, although this time it was from the ground up instead of the back massaging holes on the sides. It looked really silly but it was fun to splash around in.

And I really loved how prettily the Punta Salinas courtyard was lit up at night.

To be continued…

Mi stima Aruba! (part 1)

Please note: My vacation recaps are always too long and probably excruciatingly boring. But I don’t care, because I write them for myself. You see, if I don’t get it all down in black and white right now, I might forget! And that’s no good. If you’ve got this far already, just scroll through the pictures, as they’ll probably be mildly entertaining.

Around 9 am on Sunday, Feb. 12, I got up and had a nice little breakfast on the patio outside our rented studio apartment in Aruba, then spent a couple hours laying out by the pool, working on my tan, enjoying a light breeze and a good book.

At 8 am on Monday, Feb. 13, I drove to work in Kansas City in the snow.

That is what you call a serious reversal of fortunes.

I can’t be too bitter about it though – I always knew my time in that earthly paradise would have to come to an end!

We had a pretty nice flight down to the island on Feb. 6, with just a short layover in Atlanta. We walked out of Reina Beatrix Airport in Oranjestad to find the sun shining brilliantly and the wind blowing like crazy. It was lovely. Olivier, the owner of Villa Punta Salinas, was there to pick us up, although as luck would have it, he couldn’t get the car to start! Luckily, after a few minutes of trying this and that, one of the kindly gentlemen who was assisting us discovered that the battery connections were loose – an easy fix, and we were on our way. We had to deal with a bit of stop-and-go traffic on our way through downtown, which evidently is pretty common these days, considering the area is filled with shops and with tourists disembarking from gigantic cruise ships.

We passed beaches and palm trees and a glut of jewelry stores (a good sign that people with too much money on their hands frequent this place!) and restaurants and hotels and time shares. I was happy someone else was behind the wheel, in part because I enjoyed just taking it all in, and in part because I would have been very nervous in that kind of traffic. It was somehow laid-back but aggressive at the same time, if that makes sense. Lots of casually impatient (but not angry) horn-tooting, and lots of people nosing their way into the flow where I never would have dared, but miraculously without upsetting the other drivers around them. Not to mention the European-style signage, which takes some getting used to, and having to think in kilometers instead of miles. I just don’t think foreign-country driving is the thing for me.

In any case, it wasn’t too long before we pulled up to the pretty peach-colored walls surrounding the Villa Punta Salinas, located in the Salina Cerca area of Aruba.

We unpacked and took a little jaunt around the neighborhood to the local grocery store, called Sunny Supermarket. The selection there wasn’t amazing, but we were able to stock up on the basics: cereal, milk, juice, pop (made with real sugar, to Andy’s delight), local beer, chips, cookies, bread, lunch meat and cheese. It was funny to see all the milk just sitting on the shelf, unrefrigerated, with a life expectancy of a year!

After our little shopping trip, we were at last ready to take our first steps onto Palm Beach!

It was, as you might imagine, gorgeous. Unfortunately we were also hoping to come across an inexpensive restaurant for dinner, and we didn’t quite manage that, wandering through the Marriott Beach Club and Surf Club Resorts. But at last we settled on La Vista restaurant, with a little pizza for Andy and a calzone for me, which were about $15 apiece – quite a bit better than the $50 dinner buffet they also offered. We sat outdoors and enjoyed a splendid view of the beach, though a large business group did eventually show up to dine on the sand in front of us and interfered somewhat with our peace and quiet.

Tuesday morning we were up bright and early in time for our snorkeling tour. I had read rave reviews about the ArubaBob expeditions, and was really excited to give it a go, although also a bit nervous since this would be the first time ever snorkeling for Andy and me. Our guide, Stuart, an ex-pat Brit, picked us and another couple up, provided us with masks, snorkels, boots, fins, and water “scooters” (which were shaped like small fans) and took us to Mangel Halto beach. The view was absolutely spectacular. I don’t know how a person could ever get tired of seeing shining white beaches and sparkling azure-teal waters.

We suited up, got some helpful pointers from Stuart, and before I knew it, we were off!

In case you can’t tell just from the photos, ArubaBob totally lived up to the hype. We saw zillions of fishes, different types of coral, a shipwreck… it was awesome. Although it was important for us to keep our flippers moving as we went along so that we didn’t wear down the battery too much, the scooters allowed us to go much farther than we ever would have been able to do on our own, and even helped us to dive down to explore under the water (a little – neither of us were the greatest at that, though we tried). I will say, for a first timer, there were moments where a felt nervous because of the rough waves, and because my husband kept dawdling behind the group, making me think he had drowned. But Stuart was great about keeping track of us, and was very quick to rescue me from some scary fire coral when I didn’t quite manage to follow along in a straight line the way he had directed us to do. He also took tons of photos with a nice underwater camera for no extra charge, so that we could just enjoy the view without fiddling with more equipment. And he even said that we did great for our first time snorkeling (hopefully he meant it and wasn’t just being nice! ).

We got back to our villa just in time for a little lunch, and then headed back off to Palm Beach. We found a nice spot in front of a Holiday Inn restaurant to park our towels, then settled in to enjoy the rest of the day. People-watching on the beach is a lot of fun, because there is just such a variety! And more importantly, you quickly come to realize there’s no reason to be self-conscious about how you look in a swimsuit, because sure as shooting, nobody else there does! For instance, there was a very tan but not very young lady doing some t sunbathing to our right, and a plethora of older men in Speedos and older women in bikinis that came sauntering past. There were young, attractive-looking people, too, of course.

I most enjoyed the several little bitty girls who stopped by in awe of Andy’s monstrous sand creature, which I dubbed CatDog.

Andy also enjoyed several Balashi and Balashi Chills, thanks in part to my generous employer’s gift of a collapsible cooler.  Seeing it full of beer amused me, for some reason.

We were able to fill the cooler with ice purchased at this teeny-tiny little shop we passed by every day. It was such a funny little place, with tons of empty shelves and even several empty coolers. They only even had one and a half bags of ice for sale. But hey, they were in business, so who am I to judge?

From a beachside bar, Andy got me one really scrumptious tropical drink that we now can’t remember the name of to try to recreate (sadness!) and then of course we had to take advantage of two-for-one happy hour.

The water was fun to swim in, too, though a bit cold until you get used to it. The best thing is that once you climb out of the water the chill is almost immediately gone. You just can’t go wrong with 80+ degree weather! I think Tuesday was the only day we were on the island that I actually felt cold when the sun went down and didn’t want to sit out on the beach forever.

We headed on home to have dinner and get all cleaned up. It took a little bit of getting used to the fact that Arubans don’t really use water heaters, but somehow showering never felt as cold as you might think.

Before bed every night, I had fun flipping through the cable channels. Aruba has quite the mix of American and British channels (some with spoken English and Spanish subtitles, and some with Spanish dubbing), and straight up Spanish channels (Can anybody tell me if El Arbol de Gabriel is any good? The commercials for it were very intriguing.), and at least one Dutch channel, and of course a couple of actual Aruban channels, which I assume are in the native language of Papiamento (they seemed to focus exclusively on clothes-modeling or the local music scene, at least whenever I was watching).

Our other nightly ritual was to attempt to drown out the rotation of 10 dance hits our young Brazilian neighbors in the villa next door liked to blast.

To be continued…

andy’s birthday: 31

This year we spent days and days celebrating Andy’s birthday. He must be quite the party animal, you surmise, but alas, quite the opposite is true. Getting him into the “birthday spirit” is like pulling teeth. He’s not anti-birthday, though, more like birthday-neutral. I find this a bit aggravating. Every year our conversations on the subject go something like this:

Me: Hey, your birthday’s coming up! Do you want to have a party or something?
Him: Eh. Why bother?
Me: Fine, party-pooper, then sit at home by yourself; that sounds like fun. [Sighs. Walks away.]

Me: Do you want to go out to dinner for your birthday? What sounds good?
Him: Oh, um, yeah, I guess we could do that. I don’t care where we go.
Me: Ok, wet blanket, please try and rack your brain for a cuisine you might possibly enjoy. [Rolls eyes. Walks away.]

Me: Is there any kind of gift, anything at all, that you’d like for your birthday?
Him: No, not really.
Me: [Shakes head in silent despair. Walks away.]

Veering off on a slight tangent here, you may think it takes some of the fun out of gift-giving to just ask somebody what they want and then go buy it, and I quite agree. However, I have learned the hard way that it is even less fun to get your husband a thoughtful gift only to find that it is viewed with incredulity:

“Why in the world would you think I need another pair of jeans? One pair is obviously more than enough for anybody.”

“A second K-State sweatshirt? Seriously? This is going straight back to the store.”

“Whoa whoa whoa whoa. You’re buying me dinner and a movie and a board game? Who do you think we are, Thurston and Lovey Howell?”

[Veering off-topic even further, I have to admit that Andy is not at all likely to reference pop-culture icons of the '60s during any conversation. But I find my own little joke here incredibly amusing because it perfectly expresses the spirit of this particular rant of his.]

But, as noted, I digress. The original subject of this post was all the fun stuff we did for my husband’s actual birthday. We went to his parents’ on the 5th to have dinner with the family and also celebrate his mom’s birthday. We ate chicken alfredo and brownies (yum), then played games and (everyone but me) watched football. I had a few spectacularly bad rounds of dominoes, but didn’t mind losing to Rick (Andy’s dad) nearly as much as I mind losing to Andy himself. Of course, he solved his Mastermind puzzle about five tries quicker than I did mine, but I still had fun with it, mostly because I was assisted by our little nephew Garrett. A few more years and he will be holding his own in this competitive board-game-playing family!

On the 15th I offered to take Andy out to the fancy-pants version of dinner and a movie. We saw J. Edgar at the Cinema Suites, and the experience was pretty fun, although it probably would have been better if we had actually enjoyed the film. It wasn’t the worst thing ever, but we both agreed it was overly long, was pretty boring in parts, featured goofy old-person makeup, and had a confusing timeline. But the food and drinks were delish! Andy had an Irish coffee and Bistro Chicken Mac and Cheese, while I had a Blue Laguna and Thai Coconut Chicken Tenders. Our server also provided us each with a tiny cup of “gourmet” caramel popcorn, a pre-packaged warm washcloth, and a Ghirardelli chocolate mint, which were nice little perks. The only issue I had with the Cinema Suites was, oddly, the seats. They are incredibly comfortable, but every time you recline them, the leather-on-leather friction creates a very loud whoopie-cushion-type sound. I did a fair amount of immature giggling for this reason during the 2+ hours we were there. If I had been really into the movie, or if the theater had been full of people moving their seats up and down, I might have been annoyed instead of amused.

On the 16th, Andy’s actual birthday, we didn’t do much at all, just stayed at home, watching X-Files while I baked a pie. It was raspberry, as he requested, and I had fun making some pretty cut-outs to decorate the top.

Unfortunately I discovered that, unless you want a big runny mess, you really just can not cut into this type of fruit pie until it has completely cooled overnight, so Andy went to work that night without even having a bite of pastry on his birthday. Of course, being generally very practical and, as I’ve mentioned before, full to the brim with ennui about the whole occasion, he wasn’t too shaken up about it.

But on the 17th, he humored me by good-naturedly blowing out his one little candle.

Here endeth Andrew’s 31st birthday celebration!

i sverige: days 5-6‏

Day 5:

Tuesday morning, we headed off to the Hilton. Jamie and Frida decided they needed some more recovery time and opted to stay at the hotel for awhile, so the boys (Pat, Ryan, Jason, Andy) and I went to catch the ferry to the island of Djurgården. It was a nice little ride across the lake or straight or fjord or whatever.

View of Stockholm (Gamla Stan) from the ferry.

After disembarking, we walked a little way across the island to the Vasa Museum, one of the most popular attractions in Stockholm. The Vasa was a remarkably poorly designed warship which sank in Stockholm Harbor on its maiden voyage, only 1300 meters from the shore. Over the centuries, multiple attempts were made to recover the ship and its contents, to no avail. All that changed in 1956, when an awfully lucky guy named Anders Franzén stumbled across the wreckage and successfully undertook the major project of getting it up on dry land again.

The very impressive Vasa.

This is a small replica of the back end of the Vasa, meant to match the paint job of the original (as best the historians and scientists can figure).

This is the upper section of the back end of the Vasa, carved in very intricate and beautiful detail, but probably not quite as eye-catching as it must have been when painted crimson and gold, as shown in the photo above.

Pat and Andy pose in front of a large boat. A good time was had by all.

I chose not to crop out those random people to give an idea of the scale of this thing, which was the biggest of the three anchors on the Vasa.

I guess if you can make boats out of wood, a tea pot shouldn't be much of a problem.

I hope someone else finds this as funny as I did.

When we had seen all that the Vasa had to offer, Jason, Pat and Ryan decided to head back into town while Andy and I went to check another item off my must-see list: Skansen. It’s difficult to describe this place accurately, but it’s a little like a cross between Silver Dollar City, a national history museum, and a zoo. It was the brain child of Artur Hazelius, who in 1891 decided to start buying up people’s neat old houses from all across Sweden, and then drop them off at this gigantic park.

I wouldn’t have guessed this, but evidently Sweden was big into making cigars, cigarettes and matches back in the day. The little museum they had dedicated to this was actually pretty cool. It even had old rolling machines which they still use, so that you can go to the gift shop and buy a box of cigars made in the style of the early 1900s.

This is the world's longest cigar, which is 5.6 meters long and weighs 112.2 kg.

A baby's butt seems like an odd marketing choice for a match company, but I can't blame them for trying to capitalize on Coppertone's sucess.

Aside from just seeing all this old stuff (which the nerd in me already thinks is plenty great), the cool thing is that there are folks walking around, acting all old-timey and informative. For instance in some of the first buildings we walked into, we saw a girl doing a glass-blowing demonstration and a guy doing woodworking.

Outside the glassworks building, the stairsteps were covered in bits of broken glass. Probably not a good place for klutzes like me to hang out, but very pretty.

Then when we popped into a little 1930s bake shop, we were able to actually purchase a retro bottle of raspberry pop. This was also exciting because when the lady behind the counter told me how much the price was in half English-half Swedish, I actually recognized the word for the number eight! Life is all about these minor victories, you know.

Me, enjoying my fizzy retro raspberry pop.

Hand-painted art for the home, directly on the walls.

I was pretty darn stoked to see this reindeer, along with all his buddies.

The Vastveit Storehouse is one of the oldest buildings in Skansen. Parts of it date back to the 14th century - unimaginable!

Andy noticed the stove in one of these houses felt warm and asked the lady working there why. Believe it or not, they actually still use this piece of equipment to make coffee! She showed us how they roasted the beans and everything. On the one hand it makes me thankful I only have to flip a switch (not chop down a tree) to cook dinner, on the other it would be nice to know that your appliances could actually survive centuries of use, which nowadays they obviously are not built to do.

Functional wood-burning stove

We were attempting to get a bite to eat when the lovely weather turned into a torrential downpour. But luckily we took shelter near a popcorn stand.

Done at Skansen, we took the ferry back to Gamla Stan. Since we had a few minutes to kill before we met up with the others, we stopped in a grocery store so that I could buy the one thing I wanted to bring home from Sweden – some Gevalia coffee from Gävle. I also got my sisters some candy bars, chosen mostly for their amusing anmes of Daim, Plopp and Japp.  I didn’t realize it until later, but the Plopp bar was actually chocolate filled with salted black licorice. You definitely will not be seeing those in the U.S. any time soon, but Madi did say, very surprisingly, that she liked it. I also picked up a nice little keychain to add to my collection.

Then we met back up with everyone else and went to the very unusual Olssons Brothers’ Garlic & Shots restaurant, where several glasses of garlic beer were purchased (but not by me). I wanted to try the honey and garlic shot, but didn’t feel much like indulging since I had had plenty of alcohol the night before, and still had to get on a plane in the morning. Andy was super excited to get a Duff beer, though.

Andy, heartily enjoying his Simpsons-inspired beverage of choice.

And that was pretty much it for the evening, aside from some languid TV watching – Hell’s Kitchen is quite an experience without censoring – and temporarily losing Andy at the T-Centralen station.

Day 6:

Before we knew it, our time i Sverige was at an end. We took our last walk to the local T-bana station and then rode to T-Centralen. We came up out of the subway and crossed the street to the main train station, where we boarded the very handy Arlanda Express and jetted to the airport.

I must say, leaving from Arlanda airport is a whole lot more difficult than flying into it. When we got to the correct terminal, all we saw was one great big long line snaking out of the Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) area, and also one massive crush of people surrounding a bunch of check-in machines. There was a very nice Swedish girl behind us in line who tried to help us out, though even she was confused about exactly where we should be. If you are ever in this situation, the key is to send one person to check in at a kiosk with all the passports while the others stand in the insanely long but surprisingly quick-moving line, which is basically just to drop off your bags. While Andy went to haggle with the machine and I waited, I had the pleasure of witnessing a bit of a kerfuffle when some lame American waiting for his traveling companions wouldn’t get out of the way of the moving line. A very polite Swede asked him to move, albeit a bit brusquely, and of course the American had to do us all proud by letting loose with some F-bombs. Sigh. L’enfer, c’est les autres, non?

Despite the early confusion, we did get all checked in fairly easily, then wandered through the duty-free zone (a good place to buy alcohol if you want to bring Swedish varieties home, since their federal taxes are so ridiculous in the regular Systembolaget liquor stores), and went to wait for an extended period of time at our gate because OF COURSE, again, our plane was late. But thankfully we were able to board without too much of a delay.

I had a little more fun on the plane ride home than I did on the way there, perhaps in part because I took two Dramamine this time. The flight attendants almost immediately gave us sweet little itsy bitsy tiny cans of pop, which just tickled me pink, and we also got pretzels and lots of water refills (I was parched), and later on good quality coffee and tea, and even a “freshening-up” warm washcloth. Not long into the flight we also got a pretty yummy lunch for plane food – a sandwich on soft Swedish bread, knäckebröd and butter, lemon ginger yogurt, and so forth.

I will give this plane major props for its extended legroom and the remote you use to activate the entertainment system (instead of continually poking your screen and simultaneously your neighbor to the front in the back of the head). However, the movie and TV selections were way more limited than on our Continental flight, and they also ran on an annoying continuous loop so that I just kept missing the beginning of anything I tried to watch. Then again, this actually wasn’t so much of a problem, since I did still have my super gigantic book and a heavy case of the drowsies.

All in all, the flight was pretty good, as these things go. We had to stop in Chicago to switch planes, which is when we discovered that when you land in a new country, you pretty much always have to get your bags and go through that country’s customs. Andy got a little irritated with me for telling the guy I had two tiny tubes of cavier (courtesty of Jamie, Ryan and the Hilton breakfast bar), which forced us to put our bags through another set of x-rays, but it was a very quick and easy process when the officials understood that it was just Swedish red caviar, which is evidently not a problem for the American ecosystem. Our layover and subsequent flight went by swiftly, and before we knew it, we were home sweet home!

And, at long last, my bloggy Swedish vacation recaps have now come to an end.

Farväl, Sverige!