Cha-Ching! Yahoo! Win! Win! Win! September found me jumping and screaming with excitement; I was going to deal the Ultimate Poker Classic II, October 13-20, 2003, in Aruba.

As the next few weeks went by the stress involved over receiving the ‘trip packet’ and all of the arrangements that had to be made around work, tending to my home and general life; the excitement faded as work and the daily routine continued.

I started to put together a list of things I would need to take, about a week before I had to leave, and made several shopping trips to pick up last minute items. Finally, the night before I was leaving town, I took an E/O after working for two hours, went home, drank some wine, played poker on Empire, won a few $$$, decided I couldn’t cope with anything, and took a nap. I crawled out of a restless sleep after a few hours and began the task of assembling everything I would take…believe me, it was way too much stuff for any one human to pack anywhere, but I did it anyway.

While I was sorting and packing, I was running back and forth to my computer, sending out last minute emails, doing a few routine things like setting the Spam Filter and my email to check at certain times, and I formatted a Floppy Disk to take with me. Everything seemed to go perfect. I clicked ‘finish’, the disk formatted. I clicked on ‘close’, took out the disk, and headed back to my packing. I came back a minute later and my computer was trying to reboot. Ugh! I did everything I could think of, it wouldn’t boot, even in safe mode, or with the windows XP rescue CD. I gave up, stopped everything else (by now it was 9:30 a.m.) and dropped it off at a computer shop. Oh drear! All of my addresses and the list of things to take were on my computer. Winging it now by scrounging through my own memory bank; I packed two bags for check-in and one carry on.

Once again, I laid down for sleep. My flight was leaving at 11:45 p.m. but I still had a lot to do before I locked the door on my way out. I managed about two hours of tossing and turning before my son called to confirm our early dinner date and changed the place we would meet. Right this moment, I was so tired and had so much left to do that I was seriously thinking how nice it would be just to stay home and ‘tuck’ in with a glass of wine. Hey…it was just a thought. We for dinner, I got the ‘I love you, Mom’ hugs from my baby boy and his gal, and I headed home to finish the last minute chores and make a few family phone calls, and a shower.

By now my nerves were wound tighter than an ‘eight day clock’. I was way beyond excited. I was exhausted, stressed, have ALWAYS hated airports, and a few other dark whirlwinds were turning into hurricanes in my mind. I finished all the chores. My bags were packed. Showered and dressed, I forced myself to lie down on the couch and completely relax while I waited for my friend, Vivienne, to arrive and transport me and baggage to the airport. It worked! I felt much better after a few minutes and even started to look forward to the trip.

We made the airport. I checked in my baggage and received my boarding pass. We had a Starbuck’s coffee and I paid three legs and two arms for a bottle of water (shouldn’t we go into the water selling business?) and Vivienne saw me to the Security Entrance and said goodbye.

Getting through Security was a ‘slice of pie’ and before I knew it, I was in another little world, all tucked away in its own little place in a section of the airport. Patrons slamming money into slot machines, concession upon concession for food and drink, people moving in both directions, a teeming metropolis that one would never know existed if it weren’t for the necessity of airplane travel.

Jill, a co-worker, met me at the America West Gate, where we waited about an hour before boarding. Four of us were scheduled for this flight but the other two cancelled. We sat next to each other on the plane, visiting through the night. I drank wine, she had something mixed, and I had purchased a sandwich at one of the shops before boarding so we shared and broke bread, high above the rest of the sleeping world. There was no snack or meal on this damn flight…even though it was almost five hours long.

We landed in Newark NJ with about an hour and a half layover. We had to change to Continental and that meant making it across the airport. We ambled at first. Jill raced outside to smoke, I hit a fast food place for sausage biscuits/croissants or some such grease for stomach filler and met her at a stand that sold coffee. She bought one for me and I promptly dropped mine on the escalator. White droplets cascaded all over her pants and mine and we left the mess as we could do nothing but wipe ourselves off and continue on.

Before boarding the escalator, we saw a sign advertising ‘The Air Train’….’the new mode of transportation’ and a machine below it that dispensed tickets for a price. With the thought in mind that we might have to buy a ticket to ride ‘The Air Train’, we hit the top of the escalator, to find a wall of windows to the right, overlooking the airport, and a glassed off area to the left that appeared to be where ‘The Air Train’ would arrive. But there were no signs or indicators of where we were supposed to be or go. Thankfully there was an attendant there to tell us our ‘Air Train’ would arrive on the right, behind the wall of windows, to take the second stop, and it was free. Phew! What if we’d had to return to the machine and buy a ticket? We were running out of time.

We jumped on ‘The Air Train’, jumped off at the second stop, and hit the long, never ending line of electronic walk ways, up a corridor with a million gates that loaded Continental passengers on their way across the skies. Well…it was really only 99 gates and ours was 98. By the time we got there, they’d been paging us because they needed our Passports and the plane was almost loaded and ready to go.

We made it but not with any time to spare. After we boarded, the plane sat forever on the runway, waiting to clear for take-off, so what was the damn rush? We finally ‘took to the skies’ and were on our way to Aruba somewhere close to 9 a.m. Neither one of us had any energy left and mostly dozed through the almost five hour flight. No time zone change from NJ to Aruba…sweet!

During our flight, we had a ‘Chatty Cathy’ male pilot. He managed to announce some form of information over the P.A. at least 15 to 20 times, especially about the time I dozed off, or so it seemed. Yes, he was being quite informative and to the passengers with window seats and those that loved daylight, they could see lots of islands, including Cuba off in the distance. My eyes would’ve frozen shut if sunlight hit them, I was in an aisle seat, had a hat pulled down over my eyes, and drifted in and out of consciousness as much as possible.

We landed in Aruba somewhere close to 1:30 p.m. We went through Customs, turned in a form that we had filled out on the airplane, it was stamped and returned to us, and had to be handed back to Customs on our exit out of Aruba. We hit the baggage claim and then found a Taxi. Taxi drivers everywhere, lined up and waiting for tourists to disembark. A gent in island wear, resembling something a Street Person would wear in Vegas, ran the Taxi Line like a Drill Sergeant. We were loaded and on our way in a half of a heartbeat. I even managed to be coherent enough to talk to our driver on the way to the Brickell Bay Beach Club, our home for the next nine days.

From visiting with Taxi Drivers, I found out that there are roughly 400 Drivers/cabs on Aruba. They are independently owned and operated Taxis and there are four dispatch stations. We took more than one Taxi and each visit brought a little more information. They’re everywhere…a call from our Hotel Lobby brought one to us within a few minutes.

One of my first concerns was being able to jog/walk the beach in the very early a.m., alone. The Driver told me not to worry, the tourists were the Number One source of income for the island and we wouldn’t have any problem with anything. I hit the beach around 6 a.m. and there were already people coming out of the hotels or leftover from the night before, sitting quietly or visiting, along with the groomers that came out to clean and plow the sand. Our Driver was right!

I was curious about the water supply; we could drink the water out of the tap, even though it’s never cold or even gets close to being cool. Another Driver told us that they just opened a new plant that converts salt water to useable water; interesting. A desert island, replete with cactus, palms, flowers, sand, and lots of moisture in the air, and fresh water.

We reached our hotel and registered. We had separate rooms but we were expecting roommates. We were both hoping that we would end up with ‘no one’ and we’d spend our entire trip with the luxury of our own space. Registering was a slight adjustment to island life, only one of us at a time could fill out a form and be given our room key, etc…in other words, relax, kick back, we’ll get to it when we get to it.

We were beat. Having traveled for hours, gone through a time change, and having been up for days with very little sleep anyway, we both hit our rooms and crashed. My crash lasted from about 4 p.m. until around 1 a.m. I didn’t sleep all of it, woke up several times but just refused to get up and start moving around so I finally erupted from the ‘lethargy coma’ around 2 a.m.ish and decided to see if I could rummage food from somewhere. It wasn’t going to happen. Nothing is open after around 11 p.m. in the way of food service, no all night groceries, no restaurants, nothing. I found out later that there is a 24 hour restaurant down town…it takes a taxi to get there and back.

I went out for a walk, visited several of the hotels across the highway from ours, these hotels sit right on the beach, and looked for a coffee shop or some type of food. I visited with a taxi driver that was waiting for a fare by one of the hotels; finally gave up my quest and returned to my hotel.

I met Larry, the night desk clerk, visited with him for a few minutes and I must have looked as if I were going to die of starvation as I explained my plight in not finding any food anywhere. He brought me out a carton of freshly cooked, fried rice, that had been untouched and told me they ordered it and had already eaten, they were too full and I could just have it…Yippee! I took it. It had shrimp, octopus, and beef in it and it was wonderful and still hot.

I went back to sleep after stuffing my face. So ended Sunday, the 12th, my first night in Aruba.