And there isn’t.

We got back to the nation’s heartland last night, and were never so ready to be home. The trip was good and the travel uneventful, but we were just ready for home.

Details to come — probably later today — along with the requisite photos…

After a nice breakfast — consistently the best food each day at the resort — Beck and I drug our luggage to the lobby and waited for our transportation to the airport. Getting through the airport was waaaaay easier than what I remembered from Jamaica. Only one of our bags was searched — in Jamaica, it was everything! — and everything went smoothly. We’d kinda taken a couple from Illinois under our wing as we wound through the airport maze. I think it was their first time out of the country, and they were befuddled about what to do next after each stop through the process. Felt nice to help someone out like that.

While we waited for the plane to arrive from St. Louis, we noticed someone had a Wendy’s burger in their hands. Now, St. Louis has been on a Wendy’s fast for a month or more. The local franchisee apparently owed the mothership boatloads of cash, and as a result, lost his franchise. That means almost every Wendy’s in town has been shutdown. I like Wendy’s, and having a choice to have one, Beck and I walked over to the airport Wendy’s and ordered our Number 1’s — $14 total for two of ’em — and settled in for a little lunch. They also had Coke products, which was the first of those we’d had since we started the trip. The Riu chain really seems to be in bed with Pepsi — same was true in Jamaica — and it’s hard to find a Coke on their property. This Wendy’s had ’em though…. poured straight from the plastic bottle into your cup. Apparently the soda machine wasn’t functioning. No matter, we took our food, scarfed it, and waiting for the flight home.

The flight, while bumpy, was no big deal. We kept hearing the crew talking about how it was snowing in St. Louis. Of course, it wasn’t, but it made for great buzz on the plane.

We got to Lambert, and were hustled into the customs area in the bowels of the concourse. This process didn’t take long, but because the customs area dumps you back into the “sterile environment” on the concourse, your luggage, carry-ons and person have to scanned again, just as though you were boarding a plane again. Ugh. However, we were the only flight coming at that time, so it only took 45 minutes or so to get through it, and by 4.30pm, we were on the road to home, enjoying the crisp fall air and the beautiful sunset over the heartland.

We’d set aside today to do a little shopping, so we took a little shopping tour into town.

Our first stop was at a Cigar Museum. These were basically little shops that talked about the cigar making process, from the growing of the tobacco to the rolling of the cigars. It was very interesting, and of course, there was an opportunity to sample and buy cigars again.

Our real stop though was at a little shopping center. In truth, this was more like the bazaars we’d seen in Cancun than like a mall. All the store managers were friendly, and would sorta funnel you into their shops to see what they had for sale. Truthfully, most of them had the same stuff from store to store — paintings, cigars, rum, mamajuana, larimar or amber jewelry and loads of things carved from mahogany (allegedly — I’m not sure I’d know mahogany if it came up and bit me). After ninety minutes and wading in and out of stores crowded with way too much stuff, we were done, and headed back to the resort.

After we were back and ate lunch, I took a nap in the room, and Beck went down to the beach to catnap in one of the pool loungers. A couple of hours later, she woke up, and returned to the room. We played a couple of games of chess, waiting for dinner. We always take a chess set with us, and have played in most places we’ve travelled. We played two games, and stopped at one win apiece.

The rest of the evening was spent packing and getting ready for the return trip back to The Lou. We got everything packed, and it didn’t seem like we were carrying too much of the country home with us!

Today was a stormy looking day, with some rain off and on throughout the day. We stayed close to home, and didn’t really do anything of any big account until the evening.

For dinner tonight, we’d signed up for the Japanese restaurant. The restaurant was really decorated in a Japanese style, and was quite beautiful. The food, however, was a little disappointing. (Do you sense a theme here?) The sushi was definitely not high quality stuff, and the rest of the meal was just so-so.

We made a pact to go visit the buffet afterwards, and enjoy Mexican night over there. We weren’t the only ones. As we finished up, we could see folks leaving our restaurant and walking right into the buffet. I guess that’s the good thing about an all-inclusive resort — if you don’t like the food, there’s probably other food opportunities!

We’d booked a trip — the Outback Safari — to get out into the country and see the people and land in its less tourist-oriented state. In Jamaica, we’d done a similar tour and loved it, so there were high hopes for this trip.

The truck picked us up around 9am, and after getting folks on board from one of the other Riu properties, we met Eddy (our tour guide) and Leo (our driver). Eddy was terrific! Throughout the day, he reviewed the history of the country, was willing to answer questions about almost anything, from salaries ($150-250/mo) to gas prices ($7/gal) to home prices. We were “Eddy’s Family” for the day, and he took great care of us.

Our first stop was a typical home in the DR. It was comprised of a poured concrete floor, royal palm siding (termites don’t like it — too tough) and a corrugated tin roof. This particular home was about 75 years old, and had been passed from generation to generation, much like we saw in Jamaica. There were currently nine family members living there, with three beds that I saw across two bedrooms and a shotgun living room/dining room combo. This house was just getting indoor plumbing, with an outhouse (men’s and women’s separate), an outdoor kitchen, an eating area outside, and a nice covered porch in the back. The house itself was quite small, but tidy, and seemed like it would be comfortable enough. Of course, there was no air conditioning to temper the hot days.

Along the trip, we stopped at a couple of schools. The children came out to meet the truck, and sing to us. Some of the folks on our tour had brought bags of candy, along with pencils, schoolbooks and other school supplies to donate to the schools. The kids really seemed to appreciate the extra attention!

As we drove through the small towns along the way, kids would call out to the truck, trying to get us to give them money or anything else. Eddy would shoo them off, and talked with us at length about it. His view — and I agree — is that if we gave them anything, that would entrench them in begging the tourists as they drove by, rather than getting real work and trying to make something of themselves. Eddy took a lot of pride in his country, and seemed to want to protect it from itself by steering us the right way. That’s refreshing!

We had a traditional Dominican lunch buffet — roasted chicken, some kind of pasta and salad. This was quite good, and served in an open air, covered pavillion. At this site were a few shops, some alligator cages, bird cages and a brightly colored parrot of some kind. This was rubber snakery at its finest, and I loved every minute of it.

We made another stop at a cigar sales shop. The DR’s biggest export (apart from baseball players) is cigars. The tobacco is not grown in the region of Punta Cana — that’s done in the north central part of the country, some 400km from where we were — but the region had plenty of cigar rollers. We got to see cigars rolled before our eyes, and had an opportunity to buy them at a pretty well discounted rate.

Our last stop in the countryside was at a cocoa and coffee farm. Did you know cocoa grew as a giant coconut-looking shape? I’d no idea. Open it up, and inside are white, pulpy cocoons in which the cocoa hides. That was interesting to see. We got to try some fresh cocoa — stirred into hot water. It was quite good, and definitely far removed from what passes for cocoa in the grocery stores.

We also got to try “mamajuana”, which is touted as a cure-all for almost any ailment you can think of, along with supposedly being something of an aphrodisiac — “Dominican Viagara” is another name for it. 🙂 Basically, it’s a wine bottle sized container of roots and chips of bark, to which you add three fingers of honey, three fingers of red wine and fill the rest with Dominican rum. The batch we tried tasted an awul lot like cough syrup — maybe that’s why it can help so many ailments!

The final stop of the day was a quick stop at a beach for a little swimming. This particular beach was inside a shallow cove, which seemed to amplify the action of the waves. They were strong, the undertow was very strong, all of which made for some fun playing and splashing in the water to end the trip. After a quick 45-minute trip, we were back at the resort, ready for the night’s activities.

I can’t compliment these guys enough for what great care they took of us. They were friendly, would answer anything about their country, and Eddy mixed mean rum and Pepsi’s! He’d stand at the back of truck after every stop, asking us what time it was. Of course, everytime his answer was “Happy Hour!” and he’d begin serving us. So, with the truck bouncing over crater-sized potholes in the road, and without really holding on, he’d manage to open a Pepsi, pour a ounce or three on the ground, and fill the empty void in the bottle — real glass bottles! — with rum. I couldn’t have had a finer drink if I ordered it from the best restaurant!

We ate dinner at the buffet, and mingled among the highly friendly vendors in the courtyard. We’d been eyeing a getting a colorful painting to rememebr the trip by, and found one that interested us. Becky talked the guy down from $180 to $45, which I thought was an amazing drop. I guess if they sell a couple at the asking price, and the majority below that, they end up doing a pretty good business.

I noticed that there are paintings and painters everywhere. There are some common threads in much of the painting, and I expect that once someone got good at these designs, they could probably turn out the paintings in pretty quick order. No matter the speed, many of them were very, very beautiful works of art.

We spent most of today on the beach, wandering up through the other properties to the main shopping drag, called Caribbean Street. Lots of real stores there, and no real pressure to buy — now that’s my kind of shopping! We picked up a couple of trinkets, and wandered along the beach, shooting photos of the amazing beauty on the beaches.

Tonight was the first night we signed up for one of the signature restaurants and got ourselves out of the buffet lines. If you wanna have something other than the buffet, you have to stand in line at 10am to sign up for the signature restaurant of your choice. For us today, it was Italian. By far, this was the best meal we’d had since we arrived in Punta Cana. Nice food, plenty of it, and great service.

We closed out the night at the piano bar, playing cards and drinking whatever the waitstaff would bring us. After trying quite a few drinks from the menu — including some nasty Cuban drink — we decided that pina coladas were what they did best. That was a nice quiet way to end the day.

Karaoke Night was the entertainment for tonight. We came in kinda late to the show, and entered while an Italian gentleman was belting out Frank’s “My Way”. However, this was the highlight, as everything that came after was abysmal. It seemed like the more alcohol folks got in ’em, the more they thought they could sing. After sitting through a bad Grease duet, “It’s Raining Men” and some crazy Belgian guy trying to keep up with a Queen tune he’d obviously never heard, we called it quits for the night.

So how do you top bad karaoke? Bad movies!

We got back to the room, and once again weren’t quite ready for bed, and started flipping through the channels, landing on some channel that was getting ready to show Pam Anderson’s Barb Wire, which was subtitled something like Ejecutor Del Ángel, which of course, I read wrong, and thought it meant something about an “angel ejector”, rather than “angel executor”. Needless to say, as bad as that movie was, we got a lot of mileage out of the angel ejector slipup. That one’ll probably live with us for a while!

This morning, we got up early, and stood in line for the signature restaurants. We chose the steakhouse, and after a day of playing at the beach, we headed to the steakhouse for dinner.

This was the same restaurant that was used for the lunch buffet, so aside from it being open air, there was no real ambiance. We had a sirloin and a ribeye, along with a variety of veggies. From my view, the sirloin was the best cut of meat, and was quite good, albeit a little thin. My family’s always been into 1-1/2″ steaks, so almost anything looks thin when judged against that!

With the two hour time zone difference, we found that we were waaaaay awake, so we stayed up watching crazy spanish-icized TV until the wee hours, just enjoying each others company.

Beck and I left for Punta Cana today. Our flight was at 6.30am, so that meant we had to get up at TWO AM to get ready, load up and get to Lambert two hours ahead of our flight. We got to the airport check-in exactly two hours early, waited for them to open up (a little before 5am), and got our boarding passes. That’s when we looked behind us to see a ton of folks in line. Glad we were there early!

Then we had to wait for the TSA security checkpoint to open up sometime after 5am. That seemed to take forever, but we got through without any hassle, despite the bag full of camera gear on my shoulder. That delay though was still not enough to allow for the restaurants and coffee shops in the concourse to be open. Ugh.

We boarded, and started our journey southeast. Once again, I brought my iPod with me for the trip, and found that to be a great companion for the trip, especially after Beck took a Dramamine and snoozed off. 🙂

Upon arriving at the Punta Cana airport, we got through immigration, picked up our bags (last bags off the plane, of course), and caught our bus to the hotel.

Much like I noted in Jamaica a few years ago, I was struck at just how impoverished the Dominican Republic was. Unlike Jamaica though, there was a lot of trash along the roads, and folks dumping more as we drove by. The other thing that struck me was all the motorcycles — they were everywhere!!!!

We got to the resort, but were just a little too early to check in, so Beck and I ran off to get a bite of lunch. It wasn’t stellar, but was passable, and frankly, we were so starving… well, cardboard would’ve been acceptable! Once we got checked into the room, though, things started looking up. The room was very nice, with a sunken seating area and a big bed. Unlike Jamaica, this was a single mattress, rather than two mattresses pushed together with separate sheets. That alone was a big improvement.

The rest of the day, we wandered around the grounds, met with our Apple rep, and kicked back in the courtyard after dinner. Once again the food at the dinner buffet was just okay — nothing like the fabulous food at the Riu in Jamiaca. However, as we left dinner, one of the staff had a box of hand-rolled cigars at the ready, and between that and the free-flowing oporto, I was able to relax some.

After a while, we went back upstairs to find that we’d had a turndown service. Instead of mints on the pillows though, we had Halls Mentholyptus on the turned down sheets. I kid you not. Dunno if that’s what passes for candy in the DR, but if so, I’d love to be in the NyQuil business! 🙂

After a big project like the one we just finished at work — six or seven months of real focus, hard work and long hours, all of us on the core team are taking vacations to get our brains back on a level playing field. Beck had already been talking about going on a little trip this fall, and with the project over and holidays looming, the window for doing anything this year had to be in the next week or two.

Beck called the travel agent, and asked what was cheap, and what was available soon. After talking through a few options, we decided on the Hotel Riu Palace Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic. We’ve really enjoyed our two stays with the Riu Tropicale in Negril, so we figured going with the Riu experience again would a safe way of knowing what to expect.

And how soon? Well, we leave on Thursday. Soon enough? 🙂

So over the next four days or so, we’ve gotta get packed, find our travel documents, find lodging for the pups (or a housesitter), get our camera situation figured out (you just know I’m taking a camera!), and then relax on a four hour flight to the D.R. early Thursday morning.

Frankly, I kinda like not having the real long countdown for the trip. The anticipation’s great, but I’d rather have it staring me in the face than being two months away!