More about our vacation

Friday June 19th…
… continued…

BUT first: some updates on the day before the 19th. Seeing I left some information out of my journal in the last post I wrote and uploaded about our holiday. And it’s not nice to leave out some (important ???) bits of information. So I will first fill you in about the Thursday. This all happened before the Mama Juana blackout Joyce and I experienced that day.

On Thursday morning, George went to the gym. We walked with him and then walked on towards the beach. While George was busy sweating in the gym, we made a long stroll on the shore near our hotel (and many other hotels). After a while, we returned and went back to the hotel. Mainly because the weather was not looking nice at all anymore.

So we went back to the gym where we picked up George. It slowly started to rain, so we headed to the eating hall for our breakfast first. Then, all hell brake loose and it really rained hard! Which kept things very cozy during breakfast, seeing almost no one went through the hard rain to have their breakfast that morning. They all took it easy, waiting for the rain to pass on. It was still raining when we returned to our room after we had finished our breakfast.

We waited for a small cart to take us to our room. And even though we were under one of George’s towels, we were still soaking wet when we entered our room. George went to take a shower and Joyce and I read a bit. Then, when it was finally a bit dryer again. Joyce and I went to the reception where we would meet up with our Neckermann dude. We wanted to buy an extra card to send, and write it there so we could all hand them in for sending to our families and friends. We had to wait for 20 minutes before it was finally our turn.

When we came back to our room, we decided we would first take a walk to the nearby shopping mall and see what all the fuss was about. It was an easy walk, about 15 minutes, tops, and the mall did look nice. Only the prices were the same as ours, and it was really a tourist made mall and not for the locals (unless they were very rich). We did get some shirts and caps at the Punta Cana Hard Rock Cafe before heading back to our hotel.

*note* this is NOT my picture

When we came back, it was around 11:15 am. We changed clothes and headed towards the biggest pool. And then, well, that’s when Joyce and I got drunk and all… I did write a bit about my drunken behavior already and Joyce’s next blog about our vacation will undoubtedly have her side of the story in it. So now, you are all up to date on what happened on Thursday the 18th, which I forgot to mention in my previous post… And now I can finally move on with my journal by telling you all what happened after the 18th as well (though I guess I won’t manage it all in one post).

Friday continues then:

After George and Joyce came back from their breakfast, George changed clothes and headed for the gym. Joyce lay herself down on bed and slept again for a while. Then when George came back, we decided we would go to the beach. While George was arranging some towels, Joyce went to the bar to check there if they had maybe found her glasses. Unfortunately for Joyce, only George got lucky and had 3 nice blue towels…

George went directly into the ocean, while Joyce and I took it easy on our beach chairs. Joyce got persuaded to play along a game of darts, but it wasn’t a really fair game, so after a while (near the end) she just went back to her seat. We ate a bit at the beach bar and enjoyed a nice non-alcoholic drink there as well. George had arranged for a small catamaran so we could all go sailing for one hour. But, seeing I am not that much into sailing, I did not want to participate. So when George took a lot of effort to stow away our bags in a safe place, which was not working, I happily offered to “baby sit” our stuff. So they went sailing, I would stay back on a nice chair in the shades with the stuff and my book.

I made these pictures and then went on reading my book. It was a really warm (or should I write: hot) day. So when my sailing stars came back, we headed towards the Jacuzzi's together. There we spend an hour with some drinks (only George had alcoholic ones) and then we went back to our room. Around 5:45 pm I awoke George. Seeing he and Joyce both were sleeping and I was getting hungry… So when George tried to wake Joyce, she was all grumpy and so she did not join us for dinner.

That meant that I was on my own with George. We heard a LOT of noise and were wondering what was going on. It seemed that there was a biker convention at our hotel. They brought many cool bikes! And made a lot of noise when entering the parking lot.

We first went to Pikalo, of course, before heading on towards the diner. In the distance we could still hear more bikers approaching our hotel. The waiters looked a bit puzzled because it was only George and me for the evening. After dinner, we went for a small walk. More and more cool motorbikes were arriving every hour…

Then we headed back to our room, where Joyce was still snoring in a very nice position (made a picture as proof, but did not upload it to my photobucket account, sorry, hihi). George took the laptop and added all the pictures and video’s we made so far on the hard drive. You never know what might happen to the memory stick. This way, we had a back-up. And it was easier to watch the video’s and pictures on a larger screen. I took out my PSP and played my Shrek game. I had already played it on my Wii and that’s why I bought it for the PSP as well. It’s a really cool and fun game to play.

After a while I really got tired, I guess also from the lack of decent sleep the previous night, and put away my PSP. I closed my eyes, after a toilet brake, and quickly dozed off. Until…

Saturday, June 20th 2009

…I woke up after a loud bang of thunder! Around 1 am it was really raining hard, accompanied with loud thunder and bright lightning.

*note* this is NOT my picture!
Please click on it to follow the link to the owners site *thanks*

I went out of bed, heading towards the window and I just enjoyed the view for a while. The thunder and rain on the room’s roof made such a noise it would not be possible for me to fall asleep anyway. After half an hour or so, the weather cleared a bit and I went back to bed, able to sleep again. Until around 6 am, when the whole thing started again… Within minutes, the water covered all the steps outside our room. When the weather cleared out, once again, I could sleep a bit, until it was around 7:30 and time to really get up and get ready for breakfast. I woke both George and Joyce and we got dressed (for success… © Roxette) for breakfast.

After that, we decided to hang out at the second pool today, the one with the bar above the pool. While George and I held on to some seats (there weren’t that many with 3 in a row), Joyce went back to the room for some towels and the hotel towel cards. When she came back, she and I headed to the other pool to get the hotel towels and also make a reservation for the Caribe a-la-carte restaurant. Our dinner reservation was made for 18:30. After all that was done, we went back to the room to get into our bathing suits and all. Seeing we had not changed after breakfast, we wanted to make a reservation on some chairs (haha) and dinner first. When Joyce and I were done, George went to change and grab his stuff.

Later on, we found out why those chairs hadn’t been taken yet. And it would be the last time we took them as well. The palm tree that was next to it had a parasite plant in it, which “rained” icky seeds all day long. So that’s one of the reasons why we lingered in the pool so much. Playing with the ball, enjoying the sun and an occasional (non-) alcoholic drink as well.

Then we went to enjoy lunch and after that, we enjoyed ourselves some more at the pool. Around 3 pm we headed back to the room, we had enough of those seeds and also wanted to enjoy a nice shower before going to dinner. And a nice siesta was not that bad either *winks*.

Around 6 pm we headed towards out dining place. Since we were a bit early, we first checked out some more of the motor cycles that had arrived during the day.

And then, it was time to go and enjoy our dinner. We enjoyed it even more because Joyce was not wearing a bra and the air conditioning did a good job *winks and smiles*.

I did my best to order my meal in Spanish, using the menu of course, which made our waitress smile. She did appreciate my effort, though I guess it must have sounded horrible to her!
After a while, 2 men came in and played a nice tune. Since we had forgotten to bring any dollars, we could not even give them a tip. Nor could we tip our waitress…

Because we really had enjoyed our meal, we went back to the room and brought along $ 5,- so we could tip the people that were so kind and nice, our waitresses and waiter. The waitress we had given the 5 dollars to was really, genuinely happy with it and thanked us a lot.

Then we went back to the room where we changed, ready for bedtime. Some of us read a bit, some played with the PSP or GameBoy and some listened to our iPods. All scenarios are possible. And then, after a while, we went to sleep.

That’s all for now folks!

But remember that I’ll be back with more updates about my vacation and more as soon as possible!