Jesse and I were blessed with a trip to the Dominican Republic in August. Great timing since we celebrated our 10 year anniversary on the 25th of August! We had such a great time. One word... RELAXING! Here are just a few pictures from in Punta Cana.
Here is a shot of part of the Punta Cana Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, which was where we stayed. Punta Cana sits on the eastern tip of the island. It was beautiful!
The water was so crystal clear!
Here's Jesse & I eating dinner at Zen, a teppanyaki style restaurant at the resort. The food was amazing, but the show the chefs put on while they prepare your food in front of you is what makes this restaurant so memorable.
\We swam with sharks and stingrays while we were out on an afternoon excursion. It was located on a reef out in the ocean. You got into a fenced area with the sharks and stingrays and could get as close as you wanted to. I guess this guy was napping. Ha! There was another one swimming along the fence the entire time we were in the water. I couldn't get a good picture of him... really didn't want to get that close to him!
Another day during our trip, we took a day long excursion out into the countryside of Dominican Republic. We toured a cocoa bean farm where we sampled authentic hot cocoa. We also toured a sugarcane and tobacco farm, where we sampled Dominican Republic cigars and a drink called Mamajuana which is concocted by allowing rum, red wine, and honey to soak in a bottle with tree bark and herbs (thank you Wikipedia... didn't know that at the time and probably wouldn't have sampled it had I known I was drinking tree bark.) It's rumored to be an aphrodisiac, as if we needed that on a trip for two!
Here's Jesse smoking a Dominican cigar. Supposedly it was tobacco, but from the looks of him, I'm beginning to wonder what he was really smoking!
In all honesty, after this day long tour of the Dominican countryside, I have never been so thankful to be an American. I consider myself a very patriotic person... I place my hand over my heart when I say the Pledge of Allegiance or sing the Star Spangled Banner, I tear up when I hear God Bless America, and I am proud to be an American! To see children, many of them with little or no clothes on their behinds, waving to us as we drove down their dirt roads, and getting just a glimpse of the poverty in which they come from makes me squeeze my kids that much harder and thank my lucky stars.
This picture was taken up in the moutains. It was beautiful up there.
We left Punta Cana on Monday afternoon and Hurricane Irene hit the island on Tuesday. We could already tell on Monday that the winds were already picking up speed. I was never so glad to be on a plane heading home! Here's a cool shot I took on our plane ride home. I think the pilot said we were flying over the Cayman Islands at the time.
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