Mr. & Mrs. Vandebilt + kids

Thankfully we all quickly recovered from our run-in with COVID. It knocked us out of commission for a couple of days. Everyone experienced something slightly different: I had a fever and a bad cough, Jacob had a sinus headache, Charlie and Nora were sick to their stomachs and febrile, and Madeline, she was completely asymptomatic. After we kicked COVID to the kerb, we fell back in to our routine of pool/beach/resort repeat.

For our final few days in Punta Cana we were able to connect with John and Kathleen and their crew. The kids were so excited to have new friends to play with. Wednesday they came to us and we had some backyard pool fun and a very primitive beach baseball game. Mads found a stick that really works quite well as a bat and the kids have been collecting the balls from outside the tennis courts for a few days. We ended the evening with a movie for the kids, some pizza for everyone and some drinks and laughs.

Friday we decided to venture out of the resort complex and headed to the MacPhee’s side of town. We met up with them on the closest public beach to where they are staying. The kids fell right back into the swing of things with their new friends, making sand castles, playing catch in the water, and discussing all that is important about switch games. They treated us to a great supper at the beachside restaurant and some fun ice cream treats in the lobby of the convenience store. We had an awesome afternoon before we hopped in our Uber and headed back for our last evening at the Iberostar. The kids were very sad to say goodbye to their friend Akenny – our regular server at the buffet who was so great with the kids and very generous with the vino.

We were all definitely ready to move on to the next leg of this prolonged adventure. 6 weeks is a really long time to stay still in one place. The resort complex was really handy, the villa was awesome, beach was great and our own pool definitely is amazing, we were just starting to get a little bored. It was fun exploring outside the resort on our last day, and if things had worked out a little differently I think we would have enjoyed spending some more time off resort. We are headed to Juan Dolio on Saturday to get ourselves a bit closer to the Santo Domingo airport before we try again to fly out on Monday.