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
