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| GOLD Team Aruba 2018 with the board of the APG |
Having arrived on Monday evening we spent a couple of days orientating ourselves to the island and acclimatising to the time zone and the weather (hint: it's hot!)
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| One Happy A Team at the beach |
This has taken many forms, everything from flamingo racing in the pool to realising just how good an apple tastes when you have to pay a whole $0.91 for it. We've been letting Emily, Emma and Sarah get used to driving our van (Vincent van Gogh - Vince van for short!) on the roads (and sometimes off road dirt tracks) around our accommodation while trying to navigate tiny roundabouts and speed
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| Inside Vince Van |
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| Over the edge! |
We were guided to a lovely quiet little beach area where we spent several hours in and out of the water and got to work out the fastest way to get Caroline into the sea - tip the wheelchair over backwards is the answer - thankfully the sea was bath temperature so it wasn't too much of a shock!
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| Where's Caroline? |
Yesterday involved a trip to the capital, Oranjestad, which took us past the cruise ship terminal and to a small fort that housed a museum about the history of Aruba. We went in and were enthusiastically guided around by Mario before we climbed to the top of the tower up some very steep steps to get some lovely views over the island. After that, we stopped at the Dutch Pancake House for some amazing pancakes, with gluten free versions too!
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| Dutch Pancake House |
We were looking forward to meeting the APG board, which we got to do yesterday evening. We left plenty of time (an hour for a 30 minute journey) and still managed to barely make it on time due to road closures and a lorry container that was being moved across the road by two very excitable men in tiny forklift trucks.
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| Road block! |
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| Personalised welcome from APG |
It was wonderful to meet the people who have worked to get us a programme of sessions to run and to find out from them directly what they would like to get out of our time here, especially as we are the final year of GOLD in Aruba. We were greeted in their Jean D'Arc clubhouse with a sign made by the guides and the best sausage rolls we have ever tasted.
The meeting was very productive and left us with a much firmer timetable and lots of planning to do for our training sessions which start tomorrow. We are very excited to be running so many sessions, and this morning we went to visit the school that will be the venue for the weekend camp we are running.
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| Jean D'Arc Clubhouse |
Today is dedicated to deciding what we will do during our first few sessions and trying to hold our flipchart paper down on the table with as many items as possible - the wind is almost as impressive as the heat! That's break time over - time to get this project underway!
#theAteam
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