If you look back at the travel posts I've posted on here (and I've only gotten to about half of the trips we went on while in Europe), you might've noticed a theme. We don't relax very well.
There were plenty of times that a trip was supposed to be relaxing - we were going to a beach-town or we were going to a sleepy-town with not much to see or we were going to a town where we knew nothing about its history - but they never turned out that way. We would always end up walking between 15 and 30,000 steps (shout-out to Samsung Galaxy S-Health Step-counter. You work mediocre-ly) and feeling too exhausted to do anything past about 9:30 p.m.
Not that we were gonna do anything past 9:30 p.m. anyway, but still.
As of 6 weeks before our wedding we had still not decided where we would go for our honeymoon. On the one hand we could take a few days and go to a mountain getaway in Pennsylvania, relax a bit, hike a lot, look at possible color-changing foliage, and - hopefully - not have cell service so people couldn't reach us.
The other option was to go to an all-inclusive for most of a week and just relax. But we're terrible at relaxing, so there's just no way it would possibly work.
Friends, let me tell you something...it is possible to relax. And if you go somewhere with not-a-whole-lot to do, you're forced to relax, and that's terrific.
We went to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, and stayed at a place called the Bavaro Princess (made famous by my dear friend Adam Schultz, who stayed there on his honeymoon as well, purely by coincidence). It was right on the water, had a bunch of restaurants, and offered a pretty good deal for honeymooners. It also had a swim-up bar, which I have never used and always wanted to, despite my distaste for alcoholic drinks...but I mean, I could swim up and order a water, right? Spoiler alert, yes. I did swim up to a bar and order a bottle of water.
But the vacation, man, whoa. We did nothing. The majority of the week was spent thinking about how much nothing we were doing and then basking in the non-activity. We woke up in the morning, refused to leave bed for at least an hour, went to buffet breakfast and ate too much, and then went to the beach for 3-5 hours. Toward the end of that beach-time, we'd go to the beachside buffet for lunch, planning to eat something light and promptly reloading our plates 2-3 times. Easy mistake. So to ease the burden on our stomachs, we'd go lay by the pool for 2-3 hours, occasionally dipping in for a swim-up drink. Did you know that cocos-locos/mudslides are basically chocolate milkshakes with a hint of coconut? Terrific. Did you also know that if you drink two in a row (regardless of alcohol/virgin status), you will feel a combination of brain-freeze and stomach-rot? Marvelous.
After the pool we would head back to the room to shower off the sunscreen and sand, and proceed to a (usually) buffet dinner where we would eat waayyyy too much. After dinner we would enjoy the sweet-luxury of TV-in-English and fall asleep feeling fat and satisfied; the way a honeymoon ought to be.
I guess technically it wasn't *all* lying around and doing nothing: We went parasailing, took a day-trip to an island off the south-coast of the DR, did aqua-robics once, and I got peed on by a monkey. I gained just under 7 pounds. I also did not get tan.
Photos!
There were plenty of times that a trip was supposed to be relaxing - we were going to a beach-town or we were going to a sleepy-town with not much to see or we were going to a town where we knew nothing about its history - but they never turned out that way. We would always end up walking between 15 and 30,000 steps (shout-out to Samsung Galaxy S-Health Step-counter. You work mediocre-ly) and feeling too exhausted to do anything past about 9:30 p.m.
Not that we were gonna do anything past 9:30 p.m. anyway, but still.
As of 6 weeks before our wedding we had still not decided where we would go for our honeymoon. On the one hand we could take a few days and go to a mountain getaway in Pennsylvania, relax a bit, hike a lot, look at possible color-changing foliage, and - hopefully - not have cell service so people couldn't reach us.
The other option was to go to an all-inclusive for most of a week and just relax. But we're terrible at relaxing, so there's just no way it would possibly work.
Friends, let me tell you something...it is possible to relax. And if you go somewhere with not-a-whole-lot to do, you're forced to relax, and that's terrific.
We went to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, and stayed at a place called the Bavaro Princess (made famous by my dear friend Adam Schultz, who stayed there on his honeymoon as well, purely by coincidence). It was right on the water, had a bunch of restaurants, and offered a pretty good deal for honeymooners. It also had a swim-up bar, which I have never used and always wanted to, despite my distaste for alcoholic drinks...but I mean, I could swim up and order a water, right? Spoiler alert, yes. I did swim up to a bar and order a bottle of water.
But the vacation, man, whoa. We did nothing. The majority of the week was spent thinking about how much nothing we were doing and then basking in the non-activity. We woke up in the morning, refused to leave bed for at least an hour, went to buffet breakfast and ate too much, and then went to the beach for 3-5 hours. Toward the end of that beach-time, we'd go to the beachside buffet for lunch, planning to eat something light and promptly reloading our plates 2-3 times. Easy mistake. So to ease the burden on our stomachs, we'd go lay by the pool for 2-3 hours, occasionally dipping in for a swim-up drink. Did you know that cocos-locos/mudslides are basically chocolate milkshakes with a hint of coconut? Terrific. Did you also know that if you drink two in a row (regardless of alcohol/virgin status), you will feel a combination of brain-freeze and stomach-rot? Marvelous.
After the pool we would head back to the room to shower off the sunscreen and sand, and proceed to a (usually) buffet dinner where we would eat waayyyy too much. After dinner we would enjoy the sweet-luxury of TV-in-English and fall asleep feeling fat and satisfied; the way a honeymoon ought to be.
I guess technically it wasn't *all* lying around and doing nothing: We went parasailing, took a day-trip to an island off the south-coast of the DR, did aqua-robics once, and I got peed on by a monkey. I gained just under 7 pounds. I also did not get tan.
Photos!
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