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Dominican Republic (29 May - 3 June 2022)

Wedding anniversary (9th) and birthday time again (my 40th - damn!). Kristina, as always, had a bunch of free resort nights to use or lose thanks to being a travel agent, and she hooked us up with an adults-only getaway to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic (another new country to add to my list). Our child care arrangements fell through however, so we switched to a family-friend resort, and the girls got their first ever plane ride. Given all the COVID bullshit, this was our first trip out of the US since before Siena was born, almost three years ago now. So, long overdue this one!

We get a lot of planes flying over our house which the girls like to point out, so they were very excited to learn they'd finally be going for a ride in one themselves. Their iPads were fully charged, and plenty of snacks and candy bribes were on hand to keep them entertained and quiet. The flight was four hours and for the most part they both handled it really well. We were almost there before Siena finally let out the first of many "I want to get out of here!"				This was waiting in our room for me, and then room service knocked on the door with a "Happy Anniversary" cake for us. Five minutes later they knocked again, apologized, and said the anniversary cake wasn't actually meant for us (despite it being our anniversary), and took it back! Weird. Too bad we hadn't already started to eat it.

This is the Dreams Royal Beach resort in Punta Cana on the eastern coast of the Dominican. Not bad! Infinity pool with a swim-up bar, big shallow kids' pool that was more like a hot tub after having the sun beat down on it all day...

And a big lazy river surrounding it all with another swim-up bar and a DJ pumping out some tunes.

Nice white sandy beach with some not-so-nice seaweed kind of spoiling it, which is becoming a bigger problem throughout the Caribbean. Our resort was doing a pretty good job of managing it, but further along the beach it wasn't looking so great.

Good times! We were here for five nights with perfect sunny weather every day. Given this is the start of the wet season the weather can be hit and miss, but we certainly got the best of it.

We all made the most of this being an all-inclusive resort - all the food and drinks are on the house (so to speak, although for us that really was the case since we weren't paying for anything at all here!). Jade and Siena both decided they like piña coladas haha! Way to set an example.
As we always like to do, despite the usual recommendations to the contrary, we rented a car for the day to get out of the resort and see a bit of the country. The Dominican Republic is home to about 10 million baseball-crazed people and is the most visited destination in the Caribbean. Most tourists will stay put in their resort and maybe do a few overpriced excursions to the various sights and tourist traps in the area. Kristina and I have done plenty of that over the years though, so I prefer the freedom of our own four wheels. However, this is one place where the recommendation to not rent a car is probably accurate hehe - the drivers here are crazy! Everybody making their own lane and overtaking in front of oncoming traffic, motorbikes everywhere aiming for gaps that aren't there, pedestrians wandering all over the place - it's just one big free-for-all, and I had a blast!
Perhaps inevitably though, some dickhead side-swiped us haha! He tried to make his own lane and go around us during a left turn at a busy intersection, but lost sight of me thanks to his door window already being shattered and held together with multiple layers of tape (as was the rest of his car). He literally couldn't see anything out of it, and so exchanged a bit of paint with me. He didn't speak English and I don't speak Spanish, but I could tell he was trying to imply it was a two-lane turn. A few pedestrians saw what happened and proceeded to correct him, so he threw his arms up, got back in his shit-box, and drove off haha! As for our car, it's clearly had a tough life with dents and scrapes all over it and zip ties holding it together underneath, so it was no worse off after this. The rental company spotted it though and of course tried to make a thing of it. They'd already refunded our $200 deposit however, and so demanded $100 to 'fix' it. They got $0. Anyway, the Dominican is very geographically diverse with lush forests, tall mountain peaks, lakes and waterfalls and so on. It's quite a picture to drive through, but difficult to take photos of from the car thanks to the mayhem on the road.

We drove to a city about an hour inland called Higüey. In the middle of it all is this big Roman Catholic church, the Basilica Catedral Nuestra Señora de la Altagracia. Very interesting looking thing.				We grabbed some lunch across the street, jumped back in the car, and rejoined the chaos.

An hour later after driving though some pretty nice mountainous areas we were back on the coast and chilled out at the seaweed-free Playa Macao (Macao Beach). Right away some local kids tried to charge money us for parking our car on the side of the road hehe. I told them to get lost but I'm sure many a tourist has fallen for this one.

Looking for treasure.		This beach is popular with tourists and locals alike, and their pets apparently. This guy wandered past with his macaws, and another guy wandered past with his pet monkey haha!

Successful first vacation with the kiddos :)

One of our friends in our neighborhood is of Dominican ancestry and has a lot of family there. We told him about our rental car adventure, and he told us about armed militia that randomly create road blocks to rob tourists haha! The cops are all corrupt and get a cut of the proceeds so they don't do anything about it. Given we stuck to main highways he said it's unlikely we'd have encountered this anyway, but even so, if we'd known about this before we left I'm sure we would have skipped the car rental. So yeah, maybe don't rent a car in the DR. With the benefit of hindsight though, I'm really glad we did. It was fun, it was an adventure, the girls seemed very excited about our little fender bender, and we saw a lot of fascinating stuff along the way. Your mileage may vary :)

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