Aruba - New Years' Activities

From the car place, we went straight to our new favorite membership store, Price Smart.  We joined last November while we were here.  Very similar to a Sam's Club or a Costco.  We stocked up with about $350 worth of groceries and headed "home."

This is "Home." The picture was actually taken last November.  Since then they have trimmed the hedges and repaired the planter out in front.

After we unloaded, we decided to go get a few more things.  But the Ford Explorer, well, the engine kept dying and let's just say it was possessed and dashboard alarms kept going off.  As we were sitting dead with in an intersection with an 80km per hour car bearing down on us, Peggy " gently suggested" we go rent a car.  So back to Oranjestad.  We got a "full" size car.

Yes, this considered a full size car here.

We purchased some fireworks.  $6.50 got us 100 cherry bombs and 12 larger bombs (3/4" dia. X 4").  It was late, so they were sold out of everything else.  We got a call from one of Marty's collegues inviting us over.  So we watched them fire off a few rockets and things.  Then someone brought out "the big package."  It was about 30" x 30" x 5" and held a string of 200,000 fire crackers.  They lit it out in the street. From start to finish it must have taken about two minutes.  All over town we saw scenes like this:

All that red stuff is from those 200,000 strings of firecrackers.  We saw debris like this everywhere we went during the week.

We were tired, so we went home before midnight and went to bed.  But at midnight, well, we didn't need to look at the clock, it seemed that fireworks--fire crackers, really, were going off everywhere around us.