Curacao

Our third port of call on our cruise in April/May was in Curacao -- and this was one place I was quite excited for!

I had done a lot of Googling on the places we were going to go, looking mostly at images, and Curacao just seemed so ... vacation worthy. So beautiful and quiet.

We had a good portion of the day to just relax -- since we weren't going to be docking until later in the afternoon. And once we did dock, we were one of the first few off the ship.

And we were completely SHOCKED with how wrong those Google images were.

Everyone talked beforehand about the shopping on Curacao -- and how of all the islands, this was the place you didn't want an excursion. There was a lot of history to see ... and a lot of shops.

But there was one major problem -- the day we were there? Was a holiday for them, so even though it was a Wednesday, everything was closed up. A few sidewalk bars were open, and a couple crappy stores, but everything else was shut down. I really wanted to see the floating market, but of course, that was closed as well.

We walked around a bit, saw some of the local street vendors and got a few things for the kids, but we were so hot, and really tired of having to kick garbage out of the way just to walk down the street. It was quite a dirty place -- and it wasn't just our opinion. That's all the boat was buzzing about when we got back on that afternoon.

We found a guy offering "scenic" hour long tuk-tuk rides, and thought it would be fun. But then he told us we had to walk across the floating bridge because he couldn't drive over it, and he would meet us on the other side to give us a tour of the side streets. The same places we had already walked. We thanked him, but saved our money.

We stopped into one little shop on the way back to the boat, a local cheese place, since Curacao is known for their gouda. And of course, bought some to bring home! We headed back to the boat directly after, showered and spent the evening relaxing at dinner and up by the pool.

The day wasn't a complete bust, but it was clearly not what we had imagined.

Next stop, Aruba!