Dominican Republic. Day One. Success!

God bless vacation. Especially ones that start off as wonderfully as this one. Sometimes everything lines up just so and things just fall into place and it’s so lovely when it happens. This was one of those times. Turns out my family from Kansas was coming to NYC this week to visit my cousin who lives there so I was able to hop a ride up to the City with my parents on Friday. Bonus One: free transportation to the airport. Bonus two: direct flight from JFK. Bonus three: spending a fabulous, sunny, leisurely day in lower Manhattan with my parents and some of my family that I don’t get to see that often! Oh, and eating fab Asian food and Groms gelato. Mmmmm.

My parents graciously drove me to the airport (I said I was willing to take the subway!). Gotta love when 16 miles takes you and hour and a half. Since it was a) direct and b) the cheapest flight available, I flew Jet Blue Airways for the first time ever. Gotta say, I would recommend it. Decent seats, personal in-flight entertainment from the moment you board, drink/snack service. The only thing they apparently don’t have is a ban on screeching, wailing children. They should. I was surrounded by not one, not two, but three of them. And they seem to have worked out some sort of diabolical plan ahead of time to take shifts so that at least one of them was screeching at any given time. Good times.

Made it to my hotel in Santo Domingo by 2:30 am, then got up this morning to figure out my transportation to Las Terrenas, the town where I was meeting up with my friends (and no, of course I hadn’t figured any of it out beforehand). I ended up taking a bus for the three-hour trip which turned out to be all sorts of interesting. For starters, it was a mini-bus designed to hold 22 passengers max. There were at least 40 on it. People were sitting in the aisles, standing in the aisles, piled 3 to a seat, packed in next to the driver and anywhere else they might even remotely possibly fit. I tried to take a picture but it came out dark and all of the effect was lost. It’s just one of those things you have to experience in person. And then there were the random items people carried on: one guy hauled on a huge, old style television set and another a rusty old muffler with a 5-foot long huge tailpipe attached. But it is always interesting to watch the interactions between people in Latin American countries. Bearing in mind that these people were largely all strangers, everyone was immediately talking, laughing, sharing food and singing the whole time. At one point, a very heated political debate broke out that consumed the whole bus (minus me, the only gringa). Imagine you’re on a charter bus in the US and suddenly every person (again, keeping in mind you’re all strangers) on board is embroiled in a heated, passionate argument about politics, arms flailing all over the place. I just sat there watching, smiling. And when it was over, everyone just went back to talking and laughing as if nothing had happened. And then, at the end, there is no station, no point where everyone gets off. People just start calling out where they want to go and the bus makes stops and lets them off there. I got dropped off right at the door of my hotel! And all for the low-low bargain price of 250RD$, or about 8 bucks.

Oddly, even though we were traveling from totally different parts of the country, my friends and I arrived at our darling little beach hotel within 10 minutes of each other. I’m here with Katie, a friend from Lancaster who has reason to work in the DR regularly, and her friend BJ from Dallas. Our little hacienda is right across the street from the ocean. To die for.

None of us were feeling too compelled to accomplish much today so the grand total of our excursions was to buy fruit and then to go to dinner. We sat outside at a cute little hut-like restaurant and, in true Latin American style, they were out of the first three things we ordered (in the past, I have learned to just ask what they have as opposed to getting my heart set on anything on the menu). We ended up with some fabulous chicken skewers, platanos and some sort of mojito-like drink (of course they were out of mojitos). At the end of the meal, it started raining torrentially. Gotta love the sound of thunderous rain all around you. And also that it provided a great reason to sit and have another drink while waiting it out.

Tomorrow we’re thinking we’ll try to accomplish just a tad more. Which pretty much means we’re going to the beach.