Easter, Aruba, Church, Iguanas, Quarantine

HAPPY EASTER!!! The chefs set up this culinary delight for us to look at. Lots of decorated Easter eggs.

We planned for our shore excursion to be going to church in Aruba on Easter Sunday.

We were pretty much the ONLY people dressed in Sunday clothes in the line waiting to leave the ship. One person wanted to give us money for us to place in the collection plate on his behalf and to pray for him.

The taxi driver found the tiny little branch building of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The saints in that small congregation were so warm and welcoming to us. They got Patricia, me and another visiting family all set up with earphones and a man translated what was said in sacrament meeting into English for us. Steven and Glen absolutely loved attending the Spanish speaking block of meetings.

After church some little children were running around catching lizards. This boy happily showed us the one he found.

The woman behind them is the woman who translated for Pat and me during Sunday School and Relief Society. She insisted on staying at the church with us until the taxi came to take us back to the ship.

We are inside the building where we lined up to get back on the ship.

We ate lunch on the ship and then walked off again to walk around Aruba.

It was a very beautiful place.

It was covered with iguanas. We saw them everywhere we looked. Big ones, little ones, green ones, ugly ones. Everywhere!

They were all along this walkway by the water.

There's one.

There's another one. I could have taken dozens more pictures. It was crazily infested with iguanas.

There's our ship in the distance.

We stopped for a photo on the beach. This picture is one of my favorites capturing the beauty of the scenery.

And here we are posing on the beach to show it is not a postcard picture. We were actually there.

This is really how I felt about Aruba. It was a wonderful port to visit.

Dinner that evening.

Glen and I are not feeling too well by this point in the trip. I had gotten a sore throat and was starting to cough. Glen had been coughing also and we were both starting to get full body aches.

It was my only meal where I got two desserts. Sorbet AND fresh fruit.

I was worried we were getting pneumonia since we have both had it and are susceptible to it and our coughs were getting deeper and more frequent. I insisted we both go see the ship's doctor first thing Monday morning, April 21, so we could nip whatever it was in the bud.

Glen was sitting over there thinking he wasn't very sick.

Turns out we both had fevers.

Then we were seen by Senior Doctor Rudolf Schramm from South Africa.

First thing he said was neither one of us were going to die anytime soon from high blood pressure. That was the good news.

After hearing about our symptoms, he decided to do Influenza A&B testing on me because he said I looked the sickest. After a gigantically long swab up what he had me determine was my "wettest nostril" (YUCK!), the testing tray soon showed a line positive for Influenza B. That was the bad news.

The doctor didn't bother testing Glen. Since we both were sick with the exact same symptoms, he declared the same diagnosis for Glen. And Glen will, to this day, deny he ever had it.

We both got put on a 5-day dose of Tamiflu and were quarantined to our cabin until the point we became fever-free.

I didn't think I looked that bad at the doctor's office. We obediently went straight back to our room to spend the sea day together in our cabin. Steven and Patricia had to figure out themselves what they were going to do all around the ship that day. Needless to say, Steven quit the Princess Pop Choir on the spot.

We watched movies and t.v. shows on the television all day long. Glen was just as happy as could be all cooped up in that room with me. He didn't care what we were doing as long as we were together.

By dinner time, I was looking and feeling pretty sick. We had to have room service delivered to us all day. They would always get our order wrong and Glen would have to re-order.

The doctor told Glen to force me to eat so I could take the medicine twice a day without it making me sick to my stomach. Nothing tasted good and the medicine did kind of make my stomach feel a little yucky and I got diarrhea. More fun stuff! Glen tolerated the medicine just fine and felt like he was about 24 hours ahead of me in the illness.

The "highlight" of our first quarantined day was when the hazmat guy came to decontaminate our cabin. He was covered in a plastic apron and was wearing huge, heavy plastic gloves. He carried a large bucket of cleansing solution. He had washed the walls all around the outside of our cabin.

When he came inside, he continued washing down everything he could see. He stripped everything off our bed and took all our towels. He put them inside huge red plastic bags. He even put our food trays inside other red plastic hazmat bags and hauled all the contaminated stuff away. He continued washing everything and went outside and sanitized our whole balcony. I wish I had taken pictures of it all. I felt very unclean!

Day two of quarantine we woke up in Cartagena, Columbia.

There's Steven on his balcony next to us all excited about going ashore. They got a cab and drove around to see the highlights of the city that way. A couple decided to join with them when they learned Steven speaks Spanish and felt he could help them have a good experience if they stuck close by Steven.

This is what Steven saw when he looked over at our balcony. Still sick, feverish, coughing, aching, little old sad-looking me. Pathetic!

I was so grateful we had a balcony so I could escape the confines of that cabin for a few minutes whenever I needed a break. I spent a long time watching the tour buses arrive and watching the passengers disembark to go on their excursions.

Dr. Schramm brought his nurse, Grace, with him to our cabin in the late morning to take our temperatures. Sadly I still had a fever and was quarantined for another 24 hours.

Surprisingly, Glen was declared fever-free and they let him leave the room immediately with them to go to the clinic to get me some cough medicine that was supposed to help not only my deep, violent coughing, but would help with the diarrhea so the Tamiflu would stay in my system.

Look at happy Glen. He just loved being able to roam the ship to forage food for us. No more reliance upon sketchy room service for us anymore. This is the lunch he chose to bring back to eat with me.

He did a really good job of getting a plate of food I would like to eat as well.

When it was time for the ship to sail, we heard an announcement for two people to pick up the ship's phone. We figured out a couple of the passengers hadn't made it back to the ship. I watched and watched until finally a van pulled up and two people got out and hurried onto the ship. It was nice for them they didn't get left behind. It provided a little excitement in my day.

The ship sailed out of the port past the statue of the Virgin Carmen, Cartagena's patron saint of navigators.

At the end of another long day in the cabin of watching movies and t.v. shows all day, we got some surprise visitors. Steven and Patricia had gotten ice cream cones and some bags of popcorn to bring to Glen.

So nice of them. Just made Glen's day! He had been so kind to take care of me all day and they were so kind to take care of him at the end of the day.