More of the same. Seriously, please give us more of the same.

After the SCUBA trip, we spent the next three days doing the same thing we did for the last three days. It was perfect. We made friends with the bartender, fell asleep on the beach, and made plans to come back next month. And the next month, and the next month.

Even a bit of rain couldn't spoil things. In fact, the locals that were staying at the resort barely noticed, or quite possibly didn't notice at all.

But like all great trips, this one had to end, too.  We took one last walk along the beach, and stayed up super late, so that we didn't have to waste our last night sleeping.

It was a wonderful trip, and we couldn't ask for a better start to our marriage.  This is easy.

SCUBA!

Aimee and I have a new obsession.  We started SCUBA diving earlier this year, and we really can't get enough of it.  As soon as we got to the resort, we started asking around about who takes out dive groups.  It didn't take us long to find the excursion desk outside of the dining room.  Most of the tours were expensive and pretty cheezy (jeep tours and the like), but one of them was a legitimate SCUBA operation.  Sign us up!

We woke up at an ungodly 8 am on the morning of our dive, and we headed down to the hotel lobby.  We joined a German family sitting next to their well-organized dive bags, and a Canadian family that was just tagging along for the boat ride.

A few minutes later, an open-windowed mid-80s tour bus pulled up with about 20 people from the other nearby resorts.  Our first stop was a charmingly rundown jungle shack a few miles inland to pick up our flippers and dive gear.  Apparently, most of the people on the bus were just going to the beach; the Germans were the only other people picking up dive gear.

After a 30 minute drive, we pulled into a pretty textbook Caribbean beach town.  There were thatched huts lining the road along the beach, and lush, green trees went right up to the water.  Since we were diving that day, I didn't bring my camera, but I had a little disposable one that let me take a few photos of the town.  None of them came out particularly well, but this one gives a decent feel for the area.

For the sake of an entertaining blog post, I half-wish that I could tell you about the shoddy dive gear and a leaky boat.  But it was actually a pretty legit operation.  The gear was not unlike what we'd rent in the US, and the fiberglass fishing boat would have been right at home in an early-70s Bond movie.

The German family was getting their diving certification that day, so they went out from the shore.  But since Aimee and I had a wealth week of diving experience, we hopped on the boat with a local dive master, and he took us out to "The Wall."

The Wall turned out to be a fitting name for the dive spot.  It's a steep drop off in the ocean floor about a mile or so off shore, and it was a pretty amazing hub for sea life.  We dove down to about 40 or 50 feet below the surface, and swam for a few miles along the wall.  It was only mildly disconcerting that there was nothing below us, and an endless dark blue void to our right.

But the coral and fish were amazing.

The only mermaid that needs a breathing apparatus.

All in all, it was a great little side trip, until Aimee got eaten by a shark.

Tough day

By this point in the trip, our biggest concern was whether or not we were going to make it to breakfast on time.  Breakfast closed at 11:00.

After breakfast we did a bit of this:

And after lunch, we did a bit of this:

Perfect.

Blame it on the rum

There's something about putting on a wedding, travelling for 24 hours, and consuming quite a bit of rum that can take a lot out of a person.  We've never slept so well.  In fact, the only reason we woke up before noon was because Luis called us to set up a dinner reservation.  We were both pleasantly surprised at the level of customer service, and a little worried that our phone would be ringing at 10:30am.  We had big plans for the week.

But it didn't take us long to realize why Luis was waiting on us hand and foot.  After he met us for breakfast, he continued his tour around the property. He kept referring to some kind of a "special meeting".  He danced around our questions, but Aimee and I had travelled enough to know what was coming.

After buttering us up with another round of coconut drinks, he took us behind the curtain.  Now, mind you, up until this point, we had barely seen as much as a rotary telephone.  Once we landed in the DR, we assumed that we had left a certain degree of technical sophistication behind us.  But that all changed when Luis took us to a room that we never knew existed.  We had been all over that resort in the last 24 hours, but there was apparently a hidden room tucked away behind the palm fronds.  It was the Dominican platform 9 and 3/4.

So what was in this secret, buzzing room with the ten staffed computer desks?  Time share brochures.  Looking back, it was kind of genius.  We had barely been on the property for a whole day, and the grins were plastered on our faces.  It wouldn't have been hard to pry me from my $10,000, plus $500 monthly maintenance fees.  I mean, who wouldn't want to spent a week down here every year?

Since Aimee's mom booked us the hotel using her own timeshare points, the hotel staff thought that we were already at a place in our financial lives where that proposition wasn't laughably ridiculous.  We had to spend the next 30 minutes convincing them that "medical student" was a far cry from "doctor", and this week--while a wonderful treat--was not our usual method of travel.

Aimee, who had spent two weeks a year attending these timeshare sales pitches throughout her childhood (and is watching me type this right now) insists that she never would have allowed me to say "medical student", but I guess that this will have to be the first disagreement of our marriage.  Not a bad one.

But we made it out of there with our wallets intact, and were off to spend our first full day on the beach.  That was enough work for one day.

Yes, this place will definitely do

The taxi pulled into our hotel around 2 or 3 in the afternoon, and the place couldn't have been more spectacular.  It wasn't spectacular in the over-polished Vegas sense; it was more like "we're not really trying to make this place look beautiful, because we don't have to try very hard".  It was the kind of place that dropped jaws when it opened in the late 1970s, and not much has changed since then.  It was perfect.

We wanted an easy vacation, and that's exactly what we got.  When the taxi pulled into the hotel, we were immediately whisked away to the VIP registration desk.  I'm still not quite sure why our registration was waiting for us in the VIP area (or how we qualified as VIPs), but I have a hunch that everyone checks in at the VIP area.  The regular registration desk was probably just be a prop that made us all feel a little privileged as we walked past it.  Keep in mind that most of our recent travel has been more SOS than VIP, so we were a little surprised by all of the coddling.  But we weren't going to fight it.

As the hotel employee wrapped up the registration process, she introduced us to Luis, one of the resort's hospitality ambassadors.  We would get to know Luis pretty well over the next 24 hours, but we'll get to that later.  First, we needed a drink.

We knew that the resort's main restaurant would be our room away from room for the next week, and we couldn't have been happier with what we saw.

The restaurant is a massive thatched-roof hut that looks right out onto the water.  You just couldn't ask for a nicer view.

The rest of the day was spent with us grinning ear to ear as we toured the facility.  Of course, the coconut drinks didn't hurt.

We could get used to this.

This place will do

Our overnight flight was a piece of cake. The wedding-induced sleep deprivation made sleeping on the flight easier than usual, and we awoke for a mid-morning landing in paradise. 1970's paradise, to be more specific.

The open-air terminal felt like it was built in the heyday of Caribbean weekender tourism. The airport is nestled between rolling hills and plantain fields, and I half expected to see Pan Am planes landing in the background.

Don't mind that guy in the foreground. He doesn't fit the narrative.

Aimee and I were definitely in travel mode, and neither one of us were excited about the customary Latin American tourist hustle that we thought would greet us when we walked out of customs. But there was nothing. No one trying to sell us crap that we didn't need. No one looking to shuttle us into their cousin's available guest room. No one herding us into their nearby restaurant. We couldn't even catch a cab. We had to ask, like, three airport employees where the taxi stand was. It was wonderful.

The airport was no anomaly. While the country is definitely dependent on tourist money, they go about it a lot more calmly than other places that we've visited.

We did eventually find ourselves a cab, and had a nice conversation with the driver. He had lived in New York for twelve years (as did apparently everyone else on the island), but as a testament to New York's all-encompassing cultural pockets, he didn't speak a word of English.

The driver took us to the local bus station, since our hotel was an hour or two away from the airport. The taxi driver offered to take us all the way to the hotel for $80, but we knew that there had to be a bus out of town. And I took a moment to be thankful that I had just married someone who thought that the bus was clearly the better choice. "It's all part of it," she said. Plus, the bus cost $3.

Not my best photo, but here's the bus station:

I was barely awake for a combined 10 minutes of the bus ride, but what I remember was beautiful. We both noticed the lack of garbage on the side of the road. And there was definitely poverty, but it wasn't the kind of poverty that usually lingers outside of most other Latin American tourist sites.

But it was like every other Latin American country in that it was nearly impossible to know where our bus was heading, and which stop we had just left. Would it kill them to put up a sign or two?

We still had one quick cab ride from the arrival station to our hotel, but it was easy. After a mildly panic-inducing moment of unrecognition, the driver did know our hotel. Which was nice, since aside from a print out of an emailed confirmation receipt, we knew absolutely nothing about where we were going.

But things would work out just fine.

The Honeymooners

The last week has been one giant nap on the beach.  Married life sure is nice!

After a wonderful wedding (and a very busy week leading up to it), Aimee and I were more than due for a vacation.  But we knew that this would be the case, so we actually finished planning the honeymoon before we even started planning the wedding.

And by "planning", we mean "booking the hotel room".  That's about as far as we got, since we had absolutely no time to research where we were going during the months leading up to the wedding.  This was, by far, the least prepared that either one of us has ever been for a trip.  But this certainly wasn't going to be one of our more difficult adventures.

Aimee's parents let us use some of their timeshare credits to book a week at an all inclusive beach resort in the Dominican Republic.  That's correct, a Club Med-type operation where the rum flowed freely, the food was always waiting for us, and the closest thing we were going to get to an adventure was trying to figure out which guests were Canadian and which were from Germany.  We decided early on that we needed to avoid our normal travel M.O.  We needed a vacation.  So with a hotel room booked by Aimee's mom, and a flight booked by my dad (getting married sure has its rewards), we tossed a few bathing suits into a duffel bag and dusted off our passports.

We finished off the wedding weekend by visiting the All Souls Procession with some out-of-town friends and family.  We left the festivities around 7 pm, and made the drive up to the Phoenix airport.  Our excitement to travel was mildly tempered by sheer and utter exhaustion, but that didn't make much of a dent.  We were pretty thrilled to be heading off on another trip.

The flight from Phoenix to New York was easy (especially since Aimee and I were awake for a combined 20 minutes of it), and we arrived sometime around 5 or 6am.  Our layover wasn't long, but we did have time to find an ATM.  We realized on the flight over that we had about $15 in cash between the two of us.  I'm telling you, "underprepared" doesn't even come close.

The Jet Blue info screen at the departure gate said that the weather in the Dominican Republic was 83 degrees with 100% humidity.  When I read that last part to Aimee, she immediately responded with, "Oh, God.  It's Cuba all over again."

[Aimee was referring to, ahem, a great Cuban restaurant in Tucson that never uses its air conditioning.  Not the country.  Definitely not the country.]

But humidity-be-damned, we were very, very excited to be getting on a plane to the Dominican Republic.  The four hour flight from JFK was equally uneventful, except that we did have our first chance to check "married" on an official document.

Even before we landed in the DR, this trip was shaping up nicely.

-M