When I’m feeling homesick, and I mean for my home back on Aruba. I browse on Flickr for photos of Aruba. Being a tourist island there is always lots of new photos uploaded almost daily. Some are real your regular vacation snaps and there are also some real good photos there.

You’d think after almost eight years living in the Netherlands that the missing would become less but I don’t think the missing will ever go away. As soon as one year since my last time on Aruba pass by I start to feel homesick, especially if it’s a cold winter day like today and all I can think about is the warm sun that is shining there and the beach within a 15 minutes drive from home.

So I was browsing Flickr on a search term for the tourist spot right by my home, see if I could get a shot. And I found one, just a vacation snap but you get the gist.

I mean the photo only explains why I would be feeling homesick in the middle of winter in my apartment in the city. The view those two people on the photo are enjoying is the view I grew up with, that is the nature surroundings I spent my childhood walking around, exploring and playing.

If I’m not mistaken that whole area has or will officially become part of the Arikok National Park, so there is no more house building allowed there. Our houses where built there 27 years ago and was the last ones to be build in that specific area.

I can tell you a lot of stories about this place, the countless of ghost stories as this place is called “The Frenchmen’s Pass” where supposedly a lot of Frenchmen’s and Indians died during the first colonization. Or all that water you see there comes from the lagoon that is right off the picture on the right. And when we get tropical rains that water rises so high that roads are flooded leaving us stuck at home. And we’ll spend the whole day watching cars trying to get trough the water and all failing because people never realize that it’s sea water.

And when growing up people would always comment “how can you live so far from town”. In Arubian terms far is a 15 minutes drive. Well I’d live there anytime over a 2 minutes drive from town. I never liked living in a town and never will. In my opinion we got the best spot to live on the island. Although there really are more.

I think I’ll make an effort and if circumstances allow I’ll be going for a vacation this year. But it’s home, my family is there so in thoughts I’m there.