Jason and I were able to get away for a really fun trip in mid-September. With Covid numbers starting to rise again, we were looking at other options but eventually decided to stick with our original destination of choice, Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic. Why Punta Cana? Well we wanted to go somewhere in the Caribbean that had a direct flight on Southwest and sounded exotic. Punta Cana fit the bill!
We stayed at the Club Med in Punta Cana, an older all-inclusive resort right on the coast. After a 4-hour flight from Baltimore to Punta Cana, it was just a short 10 minute drive to the resort. We were checked in by 1:30 p.m. and went to lunch at the Hispaniola restaurant. This is where we pretty much ate all of our meals except for one lunch at Indigo which was unimpressive, thus why we kept going back to Hispaniola! That afternoon we spent time exploring the resort, relaxed at the beach, took a salsa dance class, had dinner, and then spent some more time at the beach before watching the evening show.
On Tuesday we went on an excursion called "Dominican Colors" which drove us about an hour outside of Punta Cana to a city called Higuey. We were able to visit this famous cathedral...
Walk through a street market...
Saw how cigars are made and then visited a farm on the outskirts of town where we got to sample lots of fresh fruit grown right there by this man in the peach shirt. He also showed us how they make and grind coffee and sampled some very rich hot chocolate with fresh cacao beans!
Here is some sugar cane we sampled...
And our tour guide with a gigantic spider that I wanted nothing to do with!
Here is the farmer with his wife singing a traditional song while grinding coffee beans.
This excursion was the best opportunity to see more of the country and what life is like in the Dominican Republic. One thing that really surprised us about staying at Club Med was how many French people there were. Being September, the resort was really sparse, maybe 30% capacity, but I would say 90% or more of the people staying there spoke French. In fact, our excursion was in French since we were the only English speakers on our tour! Our tour guide would help translate things into English to help us understand what was going on. We were expecting Spanish which Jason speaks and I can understand pretty well, but French was not what we had expected at all!
We spent Wednesday and Thursday around the resort swimming in the ocean, going sailing, kayaking and paddle boarding and just enjoying each other's company. It was really nice to spend this time with just the two of us and reconnect in a way that if difficult to do at home with five kids!
Overall, it was a great trip but we did have a few hiccups. We didn't have air conditioning in our room for the first two nights and it was miserable! It was very hot and humid while we were there but finally they moved us to another room for our third night. Also on Tuesday night Jason came down with food poisoning which was not fun at all. However, to help make up for our troubles, Club Med put is in a room in their top-of-the-line Tiara Club for our last night and it was amazing!! This was the view outside of our room...
So our last 24 hours we lived it up in style for sure. We flew back home on Friday and it took us both a while to come back from living in paradise for a bit. We were very grateful for Jason's parents being willing to come watch our children for those 5 days so we could make this happen. We are already looking at places to go for out next vacation!
