The Stratford News: beach

Many of you may not know that we just got back from an awesome, week-long Caribbean vacation. We didn't even know that we were going on vacation until about 3 or 4 weeks ago, so it was a bit spontaneous. We took a scuba trip to Curaçao in the Caribbean. It is a small island next to Aruba just north of Venezuela. Apparently the Netherlands Antilles was dissolved in 2010 so now Curaçao is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and most people (at least at the resort we were at) spoke Dutch to us until we told them we needed English.

Our main reason for taking this trip was to do some scuba diving. We did two boat dives every day and on some days did another shore dive or two. It was very windy and pretty choppy out on the ocean in the boat. I got a little seasick the first day or two but after that a lady in our group gave me some Bonine for motion sickness and it helped a lot. The diving was great. We saw so many fish and I was astounded at how many varieties of coral there are on the reefs there! We saw barracuda, sea turtles, french angel fish, parrot fish, rock fish, trunk fish, trumpet fish, banded shrimp, lion fish, sea stars, seahorse, a giant lobster, spotted eagle rays, several varieties of moray eels, snake eels, flounder, flamingo tongue, squid, a flying gurnard, lots of flying fish, and various other Caribbean reef fish. The weather was lovely and we enjoyed the beach and being outdoors a lot. There were lots of lizards all over the place, including little geckos that would fit nicely on a quarter.

Here is a selection of pictures from our trip. It was hard to narrow it down to this many! I'm going to put more on Facebook, so look there also in a day or two.