John and I celebrated out 20th wedding anniversary on July 8th. We wanted to do something really fun for this big year, we looked around and decided on the Dominican Republic. We wanted to go somewhere tropical and not too expensive.... and it fit the description. We flew there on John's frequent flyer miles and found a nice all inclusive resort. It was called the Catalonia Bavaro Royal Resort. We learned that 5 star resorts in 3rd world countries aren't quite the same as the US standard.... We really liked the "all inclusive" style of traveling. It was so nice to not worry about how much dinner or lunch was going to cost and it wasn't hard to decide where to go. They had several restaurants to pick from and always had a buffet open. We were never hungry... we ate way too much!!! We loved a little ice cream/crepe place! Went there almost every night.... even after having dessert with dinner...
It was weird to be the minority there. There were very few Americans. We only met about 5 couples from the US and few others that spoke English that were from Canada. Most of the tourist there are from Germany, Spain and Canada. When you walked in a restaurant they asked what language you wanted your menu in. The staff did a pretty good job at understanding us, but there were a few times that we wished we spoke spanish! especially when ordering drinks, we hoped they understood the "no alcohol" part! We pretty much stuck to diet pepsi and bottled water.
We left on Sunday night and flew all night and arrived Monday afternoon... luckily we were able to upgrade to first class! We were spoiled. We checked in and headed for the beach. It was beautiful! The water was warm and clear.... paradise. Our only two complaints were that in the afternoon as the tide came in, there was some seaweed that washed on shore...not terrible but not pretty. The 2nd complaint was that there are mostly european tourist there, which meant lots of topless sunbathers! That is so strange... I don't understand that one. We had to strategically find our beach chairs each day, by looking around and seeing where the old ladies were. It was mostly older Europeans... not the young pretty ones. which was good i guess. Poor John.... had to close his eyes a lot. We had codes, like don't look at 3:00... it was funny.
We woke up everyday and had a nice breakfast and then went to the beach. We'd swim, snorkel, go kayaking and just sit and read. well, one of us read... the other can't sit still much. He actually did pretty good and relaxed a lot. We did one excursion and went snorkeling. They took us out to the reef. It was beautiful, I've never seen such pretty coral. But the snorkeling is much better in Hawaii. We'd have lunch by the pool and head back to the beach. Then in the early evening we'd end up at the pool and then go in and get ready for dinner. We repeated this everyday! Sleep, eat, beach, eat, pool eat, sleep.... so fun!
We never left the resort... we heard it wasn't real safe and there was nothing close by. In the evenings they had little shows and dancing and stuff. Friday night was Dominican Night and they had vendors come in and sell stuff. It was the same things at every booth... not much to pick from. And they were pretty hard core salesmen. Not my kind of shopping.
We were so sad to go home on Saturday! We could have stayed a month! It was so relaxing and enjoyable. We had long talks and loved being together. John surprised me on our anniversary with a cd of a song he wrote and had recorded! He said he wrote a poem a year ago and after a while a melody came to his head, so he went to a recording studio and this guy helped in write the song out and put music to it. It was so beautiful. He'd like to fix it up before I post it on here, he wants to have the guy add some more instruments to it. I loved it!
We came home to the kids safe and sound! They even had the house clean!
