With all the rain Aruba has received in the past several months, there have been plenty of rainbows. This one showed up off the coast of Palm Beach this morning. Take a look at the panorama by clicking on the photo to enlarge it.
Here’s another angle in regular format.
The hotels and government have been doing a good job of keeping the beach tidy as these waves of weather pass over the island. Plenty of people were out strolling, reading, or just relaxing. Hey, that’s what the beach is for.
Essoville gets its name from the days when Esso owned the Lago Refinery on the southeast end of Aruba. It’s a collection of homes and business with a few churches, schools, and yes, a rum shop thrown in. What’s a rum shop? Well, most of them are simply long bars shaded from the sun inside a shack. Essoville is a little more grandiose as it sits inside a regular building but is open to the breeze thanks to several large doors. Here’s a look from the outside. Click on the photo to open it in a separate window and see the whole span.
Hard to miss the place. Going inside, you’ll see the simplicity of the establishment.
Not much to it but friendly company and a variety of beverages including, rum, whiskey, beer, and even wine. During my touring of the various rum shops throughout the island, I found the beer at the Essoville Shop the coldest. Some of it will have ice floating in it. At any rate, enjoy your beverages responsibly and check out some of these local places in Aruba to experience the true Caribbean.
Bon dia.
Still messing about with that panorama function on the new camera. I arrived in Aruba at 1:40 and at Charlie’s Bar at 1:57. Good timing. I took out the little Sony digital device and snapped a pan before the imbibing commenced. That’s my friend and bartender, Cor, in the center of the photo. You have to click on the photo to open it in another window that will show you the entire span.
Things got a little blurry in the middle. Not the fault of the camera. That was me trying to take the picture and tilt the glass at the same time. Either way, came out quite nice. I’ll be shooting lots of these panoramas in Aruba over the next several weeks. I want to document some locations. Many things have changed on the island since I started coming here about 16 years ago. It’s nice to have a record of what was.
Bon dia.
My wife is an excellent photographer and created a beautiful 360 degree panorama of an Aruban landscape the other day. She took a series of photos then stitched them together with her computer wizardry. (Don’t ask me how this is done. I understand the darkroom but not the digital process.) At any rate, the final product is too large to put directly here on the blog. However, here is a link to it:
http://www.danielputkowski.com/main/aruba360/aruba_360.html
A viewer must use the link directly as you will not find it anywhere on my regular website. You can click on it above or copy and paste it into the address bar of your web browser. (Or so they tell me.)
So where was this photo taken? Well, we were headed out to the Natural Pool in “Old 918,” which would be my Chevrolet Silverado previously mentioned on this blog. The road to the natural pool gets gradually worse until you come to a sort of “last stop” for regular vehicles. Of course we proceeded up the worst hill as Old 918 never shies from a challenge. It climbed that hill like a roll through the mall parking lot. Now we were basically one ridge away from Aruba’s eastern edge; the windy side that is. We stopped for a look around. My wife hopped out with her camera and walked about 50 yards away. As she started taking photos, another truck, the red one you see, started climbing the hill. Naturally, he stopped to chat with a fellow pickup aficionado.
Back to the photo. As it loads, the extreme left of the photo would be looking south by slightly west. Scrolling to the right you gradually look west, then west by north, then north, then north by east, east, and finally a piece of south by east before turning west again. I think so, anyway. But check out that landscape? Hardscrabble rocks and cactus, Hooiberg (the haystack like mini-mountain), distant sea, tiny hotels far off, the WEB plant making smoke, it’s all there.
Enjoy and bon dia from Aruba.
Many thanks to my wife who is a genius at such things.
The Bent Page 
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