During the first years of our marriage, we often would use our meager vacation time to stay at a Hawaii or Mexico beach or even a Washington State campground for a week. For Meg, this was a time to relax and get away from our corporate working world mindset, and wanted to spend a few hours a day on a beach or pool lounger reading a book. I was a little different. This was our only vacation time for the year and I didn’t want to waste any second of it doing nothing in a beach chair. I still wanted to explore and do ALL the tourist things – waterfall hikes, luaus, tropical gardens, boat trips, museums, and to see every snorkeling beach I could see. This was my only vacation for the year and I wanted to make the most of it. I also wasn’t very good at just….chilling out. We always compromised to make us both happy, as you do in a marriage, and we were both happy.
But now…. I have changed. Somehow during our thirty some years of marriage…. I have turned into a beach bum.
So, I still a have a teeny bit of guilt that we didn’t really explore the country of the Dominican Republic. I have seen the pictures of mountains, historic cities, waterfalls, hikes, caves and the many beautiful beaches. We ended up seeing just 3 beaches. But they were pretty nice beaches.
I don’t really have a responsibility for being a travel explorer except for writing a blog that only a few or my friends and family read. I can do what I want. Sometimes, that means we don’t do anything, except choose if we want to sit by the pool or by the beach.
We spent another week on the beach. We didn’t travel further than walking distance from our Airbnb. We took a lot of beach walks and had lunch and dinner with our feet in the sand at almost all of the many beach cafes in the town of Cabarete. I don’t have much to write about. Cabarete doesn’t have the local fishing fleet to watch like last weeks town of Las Terrenas. Instead, we watched the wind and kite surfers.
This town also has a lot of French Canadians but we didn’t really talk to many people because of the language barrier. We also had difficulty talking Spanish to the Dominicans when in restaurants or stores. They talk super fast and have way different pronunciation than we are used to in Mexico or Spain. So our week consisted of reading books, walking the beach, swimming, and following news about the Mid-Term elections. I’m not complaining about anything.
Our Airbnb was a condo with a nice pool that was less than $60 per night. We did not skimp on eating out, and our meals were rarely more than $40 including multiple beers or beachy drinks. We had a kitchen but only used it for breakfast. I can see why many people are choosing the DR as a place to spend several months per year. It feels a lot like Mexico (which we love) and would be a good future “snowbird” location for us if it wasn’t so far away from our homebase in Seattle. It would be tougher for people to come visit us which is becoming more important to us as we get older.
This is our last stop on a trip that actually started at the beginning of August. We saw multiple new countries in the first half our time, and our appetite for exploring has diminished in the last few weeks. The DR was a perfect ending point. We are now heading back to Seattle for Thanksgiving for a couple of weeks to see a lot of people we are missing. It will be a short trip home but hopefully we can get our batteries recharged for what is going to be a busy 2027 of exploring the world. Of course we have included many beach locations in our plans. At least now I know how to do nothing on a beach and like it.