Punta Cana!!

It’s winter in Wisconsin so naturally I had the itch to get away to get my feet in sand and soak up some Vitamin D. I started researching vacations while I was on leave between Christmas and New Years. We always like to visit somewhere new, but with the Covid-19 still being a thing, it limited some of our choices. Most of the tropical locations we have not been to requires a negative test to get in. Not the end of the world, but not something that we wanted to deal with. This limited our options to either Mexico or the Dominican Republic. Since we had just been to Mexico in August and we have really enjoyed the Dominican on our past visits I went for Punta Cana. I spent an entire day reading reviews and hemming and hawing about which resort to select and/or if we should check out a different side of the island. I ultimately chose Dreams Palm Beach in Punta Cana due to the positive reviews and access to Bavaro Beach. From having been here in the past I knew I could walk for many miles on the beach and that appealed to me greatly.

Sunday, February 20th Tom and I woke up to a very chilly 57 degrees in our house. When I came home the night before I noticed the heat was set for 70, but it wouldn’t move past 65. This happened once before where the furnace was running, but was blowing cold air. At that time I changed the air filter, turned the thermostat on and off, and it did the trick and started working again. I did this again, but this time it didn’t work. Crap! What were we going to do? We were leaving in the morning for a much warmer destination and we knew that we couldn’t let the house get too cold, and we certainly didn’t want to come home to a cold house. So we did what anybody would do and left, and then asked my Mom if she could come over during the week if we could get a repairman to come out and take a look at it. I mean our furnace is only 3 years so surely it must have been something small right? Well I’ll get more into that later . . .

We made it the airport and got through check-in and security with only about 20 minutes to spare. It was a little tighter time frame than I prefer, but it worked out. Our flight went off without a hitch and before we knew it we landed in beautiful, sunny, warm Punta Cana. I didn’t pre-book transportation to our resort so we got a taxi (which ended up being the same price as if I would have booked with Funjet). It was nice that we didn’t have to wait for anybody and just got in the taxi and went. Check-in was a breeze and we were enjoying our fist Mai Tai when a rep presented us with our $200 in resort credits and told us about our welcome breakfast in the morning. It took a few minutes before I truly realized where the conversation was going, which was the invite to attended the Vacation Club sales pitch. We’ve done this a couple of times before so we knew what we were getting ourselves into. As Tom said we could always just walk away and it was only 1 1/2 hours. So to get $100 in leisure cash to put towards an excursion, we agreed to go.

Our room was ready right away. I had paid for an upgrade to get an ocean view room and was skeptical on how good the view would actually be, so we were pleasantly surprised when we had a full ocean view. So happy it wasn’t just a sliver that we would have to turn our heads to the far right or left to see. It was worth the extra money. This particular resort was not huge – which can have its ups and downs. For the most part I enjoyed it, with the only down side being that there was not a good loop to walk in the morning. For me, I prefer to walk the beach, but if I want to run I prefer to have a nice paved surface. Not so much here. There were five specialty restaurants at the resort and this particular resort you did not have to make reservations. Upside of no reservations is that you have flexibility in when and where you want to eat, the downside is you might choose what you want and then have to wait for 30-40 minutes to get seated. This wasn’t an issue for us because Tom and I like to eat late, so the later you go the less you have to wait. The first night we went to the Mexican restaurant around 7:00 and waited maybe 30 minutes for a table. No big deal. We just got a beer and sat on a bench swing. The food was excellent. The other nights we aimed to go to dinner around 8:00 and that definitely made a difference. Some nights we had no wait and were seated right away. On our way to the restaurant the first night I didn’t see a small ledge while we were walking and I jammed my right pinky toe pretty good. I don’t know if you can break that toe, but it sure felt like I might have. As the week went on it didn’t feel as bad, but once I put my tennis shoes on for the trip home, I could still feel that it’s aggravated. I don’t think it’s anything serious, but boy it sure did hurt after I first did it.

Monday morning Tom and I set out to see if we could find a decent place to walk outside of the resort, but after signing out at the gate we quickly found that this was not at all like the awesome walking paths we had at Xcaret in Mexico. We were in the little town outside the resort gates and although it had a sidewalk, everywhere you looked there was trash. We did get some steps in, but ultimately decided we would not be walking that again. At 9:00 we had our reservation for our “welcome breakfast” sales pitch, but being two hours ahead of Wisconsin, it was also the same time that Affordable Heating and Air Conditioning opened. Tom wanted to call them right away to get someone scheduled to come take a look at our furnace. We told our sales rep that we needed a few minutes to coordinate our situation at home. We were able to work it so that the furnace people could meet my mom at our house that morning. Great! We would hopefully have some answers soon. I did notice after we made the call that the furnace looked like it was working because the temperature in the house was now 62 and I turned it up to 65 and I saw that the temperature was going up. We still felt it was important to get it checked out right away. We got it coordinated and then found ourselves in a taxi to go to the “sister” resort of Secrets Cap Cana. This was at least a 20 minute or more ride away from our resort. I guess we were going to be stuck and really wouldn’t be able to just walk away. I did want to see the Cap Cana area because I was looking at some of the resorts there while I had been conducting my research, so I wasn’t too disappointed that is where we ended up going.

Secrets Cap Cana was very nice and an adults only resort. It seemed very quiet. I think I would like it and it had a nice beach, but not one that I could walk for miles on. We told our sales guy early on we probably wouldn’t be interested because we have relatives that belong to two different clubs already and we are able to use theirs. Well of course they have to do their job and try to sell it to us, so we went through the whole speel. In the middle of this we started to get communications from home from the furnace repairman and the news was not good. He told us that whoever installed it had did an incredibly crappy job and there were multiple things wrong with it. He didn’t even want to think about trying to repair it and that we would likely need to replace the furnace and air conditioner (which the AC was also new at the same time as our furnace in 2018). This is certainly not the news we were expecting to receive. So right then and there we made the call to replace the whole thing and not even try to work with the previous company to fix it. I mean do we really want the same people who did a crap job to come back? This is typical for projects on our house. I mean why do it once when you can do it two or three times before you get it right? Ughh. Well we got this news right about the time the vacation club folks were giving their big push for us to buy their club. Our “no” just got a whole lot easier by telling them that we had to spend a small fortune at home to fix our furnace and AC. They put us back in a cab and we headed back to our resort. We got back to the resort and it was after Noon and maybe even close to 1:00. So much for that hour and a half. We spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing on the beach and went to the Italian restaurant for dinner. We enjoyed the food and were quite pleased with the portion sizes. We appreciated that the portion sizes were smaller and manageable. I heard someone else talking at the pool later in the week that they felt like they left the restaurants hungry and had to go to the buffet. I totally disagree, but hey to each their own. After dinner we headed to the nightly entertainment area and found it was trivia night. The MC would tell the audience what he was looking for in a song that would play. For example it might be “What movie is the song from?” or “What is the name of the song and artist?” I thought we would be pretty good at it, but turns out not-so-much. We had a good time anyway listening to the crowd and particularly watching the lady in front of us react to the stuff other people were shouting out (“OMG if they say Star Wars again . . . “)

Tuesday our vacation felt like it finally started. Nowhere to go and the only concern of the day was how the install of our new furnace and AC was going. We heard there was in ice storm happening back at home and we were worried that the workers would slip and fall and hurt themselves, but thankfully the install went off without a hitch. Spending more money on something we just did a couple of years ago sucks, but the peace of mind knowing that it’s fixed (and hopefully correctly) is worth it. The proof will be when we get home and see how fast the house heats up.

I was up early and out the door to walk the beach as the sun was rising. I ventured a mile and a half down the beach to a geocache that I couldn’t get to when we were here 5 years ago. At that time I was coming from the opposite direction and as we got close to the cache there was a body of water we felt we couldn’t navigate across. No obstacles in my way this time coming from the other direction. The walk to the cache was peaceful as there were no resorts after ours (well there was one but it seemingly went out of business and was all fenced off). I got close to the cache and found that I had to head into a little bit of woods. No problem, I have experience with this. It was a little buggy in there and I’m quite sure I got bit right away. After a short search I spotted the hide location and had the cache in my hands. A DNF avenged! I decided to walk a little further to see if the water obstacle from 5 years ago was still a thing. Not that day it wasn’t. It was completely dry! Now seeing it dry, it was just a sandy bottom so it would have been completely safe to take of our shoes and cross, but at that time we made the safe choice. I continued on my walk and recognized things I saw when I made that same walk 5 years ago. I walked maybe another mile after the cache and then turned around and walked back. On my hike back I found a little area that had a bunch of sea glass in the rocky coral. Well actually most of it was just broken glass that nature hasn’t turned into sea glass yet, but I really enjoyed walking and looking through it and picking up some good pieces. I have enough shells, so this trip I concentrated on finding sea glass. I got back to the resort and Tom was in the room chilling on his laptop at a table he moved so he could take in that ocean view (and this is why paying extra for the ocean view was worth it).

This is the dried up water hazard that we tried to cross 5 years ago. As you can see it’s super sandy!!

I got myself beach ready and Tom and I decided to head to the Preferred Club restaurant that was open for breakfast and lunch for preferred guests that was right on the edge of the beach and just steps away from our building. We found that breakfast was just about over, but lunch was starting at Noon so we decided to hold out for lunch. We set out to find some chairs on the beach or pool, only to find that every single chair was taken, although some were just occupied by a towel and people’s stuff. We did find an empty covered area on the beach, but there were no chairs. A resort worker went on the hunt looking for chairs and could only come up with regular 4 legged plastic chairs. I decided to just lay a towel on the sand, and Tom found a chair outside the preferred lounge. Tom came and got me at Noon and we headed to lunch. Again, the food was excellent! At that point we decided that we would make it a goal to not eat in the buffet the entire trip. Goal accomplished! The lunches at the Seaside Grill were so tasty and they had so many choices that we could get something different everyday. Also lesson learned for the day was to reserve a chair first thing in the morning, otherwise you would be out-of-luck. The resort definitely had room to put out more chairs out so I’m not sure if they removed a bunch to social distance for Covid, or if they just need to buy more chairs.

I read two Jack Reacher novels on this trip (Tripwire and Running Blind). They were ok, but I find them too unrealistic so I doubt that I will persue the series any further. For dinner we went to the French restaraunt and had another delicious meal.

Wednesday morning I got a little later start and headed out at 8:45 to walk the beach in the opposite direction. This direction had more resorts, but not a ton and once I got past the last resort I was again pretty much in solitude enjoying the scenery and the walk. I walked as far as I could before it wasn’t really feasible to keep going, but at that point I had already walked 2.5 miles one way so figuring the round trip was 5 miles I was good with that and turned around. I also found sea glass as I neared the 2 mile mark so I had a ton of fun “treasure hunting”. Tom had reserved some beach chairs first thing in the morning so when I got back I went right to the chairs to sit and relax. Tom came out to join me and we sat there till lunch. When I returned after lunch I found one of our chairs gone. Someone moved the stuff we had on it to the chair they left behind and took it. Rude!! Tom had gone up to the room for a minute so having one chair just then was ok and when he got back I was planning to go up to the lobby to book an excursion so again 1 chair at that point was ok. Thankfully though as I was getting ready to head to the lobby I saw someone vacating their chair, so I confirmed with them that they were done with it and dragged it back over to our area. This chair thing was really kind of annoying.

I talked to the excursion people and told them we wanted to go to Sanoa Island. There were two options, the regular and for $50 more the VIP. The VIP experience got you better food, drinks, less people in the group and being taken to a more secluded part of the island. Yes please! So that $100 leisure credit from our sales pitch on Monday ended up paying for the upgraded experience. The rest of the afternoon was spent relaxing and we kept our routine of a late dinner. Dinner was Japanese hibachi. This is the first time we didn’t think we would be able to eat what we set out to because the hibachi tables were already spoken for the rest of the evening. Just as we were about to walk away and decide where to go next, the hostess told us that two people had just cancelled and that we could take their spot! Perfect! We ended up sitting next to a family from Shawano, WI. It was a Mom, Dad, their adult daughter, son and his wife. We really enjoyed talking to them as we seemed to have similar interests. The food was only ok (in my opinion they left the chicken and steak on the grill too long and overcooked it), but the show and company was a lot of fun. The nightly entertainment was a magic show. It was ok, and I had fun John Maddening how I thought the tricks were being done.

Thursday morning was kind of a repeat of Wednesday where I got up and went for a beach walk (back in the direction of the geocache) and then came back, read my book on the beach, went to lunch, back on the beach and then moved to the Preferred Club pool, then a late dinner at the Seaside Grill which had seafood options for the main course. It was good, but not our favorite restaurant.

Friday was our excursion day so no beach walk in the morning for me. We were picked up at 7:35 and we were pleased to see the family from our Japanese dinner night get in the van. Hey somebody we knew!! The van took us to another location where we met up with the big bus that took us to the port. The drive was about an hour and on the way the tour guide gave us interesting facts about the Dominican Republic. At the port we had an opportunity to use the bathrooms. I told Tom I was going to use them and he said he didn’t need to. When I got out of the bathroom I didn’t see him. I had no idea where he went, but I assumed into the bathroom. Then the tour guide was gathering the group and we were going to start moving towards the boats and I still didn’t know where Tom was so I started to get that panicky feeling that we would be left behind, but then he just popped up out of nowhere. He was just waiting in the shade on the other side of the bathrooms where I couldn’t see him. The first boat we took was a speed boat, but it wasn’t so speedy. It appeared that one of the motors wasn’t working properly.

We stopped at a natural swimming pool (named the Blue Lagoon). It was quite shallow and beautiful. They had professional photographers on the trip and we gladly posed for them. It was kind of fun and it was funny when the photographer would call us “girl” or “boy” or “mama” or “papa” to direct us. I also tempted fate and got my cell phone to take some selfies and thankfully didn’t drop it into the ocean. The next stop was another place we could get out and swim or make our way to a beach. We again did a photoshoot with the professionals.

The third stop was Saona Island where we spent 3 hours. We had a very good lunch and sat with our Shawano friends and finally learned their names (Mom Carla, Dad Wayne, Sister Jolene, Brother Jordan, and Wife Sabina). Tom and Sabina went to the bar to get a beer and came back with big ole bottles. We thought these were one/person only to find out the bartender wasn’t supposed to hand those out, but pour the beer into a glass. Well we enjoyed having the bottles for a hot minute before they took them away from us.

Our new friends – Sabina, Jolene, and Jordan

After lunch I had a nice conversation with a couple who was celebrating their 51st wedding anniversary and the wife’s remission from breast cancer. The husband was an Air Force Veteran and he enjoyed talking to us about our service. I walked along the short beach of the island and Tom tried to snorkel, but it was too sandy to really see anything. We ended up tossing one of our water balls around with Jordan, Sabina, and Jolene and a couple of other random people that joined us. It was a really good time. We took a party yacht back and enjoyed beverages and some dancing on the boat. We also were able to review our photos from the professionals and decided to buy all 69 photos for the cheap price of $130 (not really cheap, just me being sarcastic – but there were some really good pictures in there and if I had to rationalize the purchase Tom and I did just win a nice chunk of money in a Superbowl pool, so totally worth it). By the time we took the bus ride back to Punta Cana and back to our resort it was after 6:00p.m. It was such a fun day. For dinner we wanted to eat at the Mexican restaurant again and even though we were there a little after 8:00 the hostess told us 17 groups were ahead of us, so we opted to go up to the Italian restaurant instead and were seated immediately. After dinner the nightly entertainment was a Cirque du Soleil type of show. It was really quite good! There were aerial artists, fire artists, clowns on stilts, two extremely strong guys doing tricks with each other. The scariest was when one of the guys was upside down holding on to the other guys head with only 1 hand and the guy who was balancing him made a complete 360 degree turn and walked a few steps. So impressive! I would have to say as far as nightly entertainment goes, I thought this resort’s was pretty good. No cheesy song and dance shows.

Our last day was one last chance to relax and it was a repeat of how our Wednesday and Thursday went. I walked on the beach in the morning (although this time I went a couple of hours earlier then I had the first time I went in that direction, and this time the tide was too high for me to find any sea glass treasures). I did see a beautiful sunrise though. Then the rest of the day was spent reading a book and relaxing at the pool and beach with our final dinner back at the Mexican restaurant. The hostess remembered us from the night before and told us it was another long wait. We told her we didn’t mind waiting, but before we knew it she had a table ready for us. I think she felt bad from the night before and I think she snuck us in ahead of some people. We didn’t go to the show but headed back to the room to pack.

Our departure day came too fast as it always does on vacation. We didn’t need to leave the resort until Noon so I was happy to take one final 5 mile walk on the beach (tide again too high to find any treasures), but a good walk . . . other then I tripped on palm tree root and fell slightly scraping my wrist on a rock. Nothing major just a last little souvenir for me to take home. I came back showered up and Tom and I ate our first breakfast of the week at the resort. It was ok, and I’m really glad that we skipped breakfast everyday and just opted for the tasty lunches that we had. We finalized our packing and got picked up by a taxi promptly at Noon. The airport was super busy and we found it a little irritating and stressful, mostly when we didn’t realize we were supposed to complete the electronic immigration card before we got our boarding pass. Oops, we got it knocked out but with just a little extra layer of stress. We got through security and immigration and didn’t have too much time to kill in the terminal. Before we knew it we were on the plane and I’m sitting here typing up our blog entry. Once again I’m amazed at how much I have to write about it. I don’t write everyday because I feel like nothing really happens, but in reality a whole lot did! It was a great and much needed vacation.