Man, what a freaking trip.
30 hours to get there, 30 hours to get home. That was on us tho, as we jumped on super cheap tickets to JFK, and headed south from there (Fairbanks-Seattle-JFK-Miami-Curacao). Smart move would have been Fairbanks-Seattle-Miami-Curacao.
We landed about 2pm on Friday, customs wasn't too bad but would have been much smoother if we had a pen on us. There's literally no pens in the airport so in order to fill out the customs card, you had to beg people who had pens for their pen lol. Was a little crazy. We rented a car from "JustDrive" rentals. We had looked at the bigger rental companies, but most wanted like a $1k deposit. Last minute we cancelled with a big company, and jumped on JustDrive. $250 for the week, no deposit. They told us about a GPS app called maps.me. I didn't want to take my phone off airplane mode, but they ensured me this app would run on airplane mode. I have no clue how it did, but man, it worked. It's kinda like wikipedia tho, people can go in and add or alter routes. Leaving the airport we had a few issues with him telling me to go right, but the map shoowing go left. I took the phone from my non paying attention girlfriend, and had no issues from there.
Stayed at the Avila beach hotel about 15 minutes from the airport. I have 0 complaints about this hotel. Staff was super friendly, two amazing lagoons, solid beach bar with awesome bartenders, drinks were very reasonably priced and were super strong. They actually tried to play a game with me to see if they could make it "too strong" for me... Bro, I'm cusetroop, you're not going to win this game.
We wandered around the resort for a bit, had a cocktail and set out for dinner. We picked this hotel it was in walking distance to downtown, and a decent amount of restaurants. We settled on this little bistro, had a bomb tenderloin. We headed back to the resort for a few nightcaps, and to try to meet some friends. We were pretty much the only folks that spoke english, so that proved to be tough.
The next day we walked about 10 minutes to downtown Willemstad. Pretty cool area, all the buildings are bright colors (I'm a touch colorblind, so it didn't do too much for me lol). Checked out the floating bridge which was pretty neat. Watched it motor out of the way for incoming boats a few times. The girl was super pumped about buying fruit at the "floating market". Apparently it's not what it used to be.. Not its just a few stands on the street, where people just yell at you until you buy their fruit. We ended up walking back to the resort by about 1 and spent the rest of the day drinking on the beach, and swimming. The resort had some solid wifi, but it wouldn't let me stream the UNC game. I ended up following along on the espnapp. Had dinner at the resort, they were having a BBQ night. Was pretty solid.
Woke up early the next day to drive out to Mt Christoffel, for a hike that VT recommended, and my girlfriend had been raving about. Maps.me took us a crazy route, and tried to get us to head into a park entrance that had been closed for 15 years. We drove around for a half hour looking for the right entrance, and said "Screw it, let's head to the beach and find food". About half hour later, we randomly passed the entrance, wayyyyy outa the way from where the app said it would be. I was a little bummed, I thought I had gotten out of this hike. It was horrible you guys. (Disclaimer, I'm pretty lazy). It was like, straight up the whole way, climbing boulders on the side of a cliff type stuff. I thought I was going to die, or the girlfriend was gonna die. We made it to the top, and wow what amazing views. I didn't enjoy them much, as I spent the whole time trying to figure out how the heck we were going to get down...
I hate this picture, but it pretty much sums up how I felt:
We made it back down without dying, and headed to a beach called Playa Forte for a little cliff jumping.
Headed back to the hotel, more beach time, more drinks until sunset. Hit up Mambo Beach down the street, as they had a bunch of food options. Not sure what happened after that, but I caught a bug or something. thought I was going to die for about 24 hours. Held it together the next day, we went to rent snorkel gear. and snorkeled around our hotel a bit. I was finally able to eat something around dinner, but that was a horrible idea. Only had 3 drinks that day, so you know I musta been sick.
Headed to Kokomo beach for some snorkeling the next day. Pretty neat little beach, bar and restaurant right there. Snorkeled for a few hours, got burnt as hell and headed towards the resort. She found a GF place downtown, so we swung by there for lunch. For the 2nd time on our trip, we couldn't get the parking pass machine to work. The first time we just left it, and was fine. So I decided to just say screw it, we'd only be gone an hour. Came back to a boot on our rental car and a ticket in another language. I took the ticket into the nearest bar, but they didn't speak english either, but was able to point us in the direction of the parking authority. Found them 10 minutes later, paid them $15, and another 10 mins later the boot was off. Not bad, I thought this was going to ruin our whole night.
Back to the resort for more beach/drinks. Bed, beach drinks in the morning and off to the airport.
Pretty solid trip. Wish it had been longer, but at the time we planned it I was worried about having enough leave days for this trip, 2k classic, and a bowl game.
Sorry for the short/sweet recap, I've got a ton of work I should be doing lol