Every time there’s a trip to unknown places on the horizon, I’m overcome with an aversion to the whole enterprise a week or two before the departure date. The laws of inertia kick in. I begin to question why we’re going anywhere at all when we’re perfectly content right here, and you just know there will be unwelcome moments of stress and anxiety awaiting you. Who needs it at this point in our lives when we yearn for calm?
That last sentence is exactly the reason we need it. Travel is stimulating. It brings new experiences that remind you that it’s not time yet to shut down and allow yourself to drift toward the endgame. Looking back on our week away makes all those inertia-driven doubts seem foolish.
In the last six or seven years, we’ve tried to arrange a winter break trip with our younger daughter Elana, our son-in-law Ben and our granddaughter Dalia. They live in Maryland and without these excursions we would see them only several times during the year. These trips are at least as much about relationship building and maintenance as they are about sightseeing. Once we’ve agreed on a destination – to a mandatory warm location – Elana and I become the in-house travel agents. We scout out Airbnb options – only three bedrooms and at least two bathrooms qualify – make some dinner reservations and explore possible excursions from our home base. Planning together is one of the most rewarding parts of the journey.
With a few small glitches on this latest trip, not of our making – car breakdowns, unexpecting Airbnb changes, etc. – things worked out smashingly, as our British friends might say. We’ve worked our magic for trips to Puerto Rico, Curacao, New Orleans, this one to The Dominican Republic, plus two early summer trips to Berlin, when Dalia was just two years old, and London when Dalia exceeded her dream by getting to attend a Taylor Swift concert. Covid threw a wrench in the Puerto Rico plans. After all the planning, Rosellen and I decided it was too risky for us to be exposed in those pre-vaccine days, but we encouraged “the kids” to go and contented ourselves with daily transmissions of photos and email narratives.
The choice of The DR for this trip was about as well-founded as students selecting their college based on the quality of the bling in the campus bookstore. Elana, Ben and baby Dalia lived for a while in an upper Manhattan neighborhood with a sizeable Dominican population so there was some interest in the sources of the culture that had surrounded them. In addition, I had a student from a Dominican family who recently spent several months with family in the DR to immerse her own kids in their culture of origin, so I reached out to her for advice.
Her most useful suggestion was to divide our time between beach and city. Most tourists head straight to the beach resorts in places like Punta Cana and never encounter the incredibly rich history of the country. Dalia needs to feel sand under her feet, so we started the trip in PC at an Airbnb, where we could plan our own agenda, rather than have them dictated by the structure of a resort. Of course, that choice was a lot easier on the pocketbook as well. The Airbnb was the best that Hoffman and Hoffman travel agents had ever booked, beautifully appointed, with a pool just steps from our living room, which is where we found members of our party early in the morning and late in the evening.
Our two beach experiences couldn’t have been more contrasting. One was a half hour north of PC, a public, rough-sanded beach complete with hawkers selling everything from coconuts to pina coladas drunk straight out of the pineapples, as well as ice cream sellers reminiscent of my Coney Island childhood. A young man was selling opportunities to be photographed with the parrots who were contentedly perched on his shoulders.
The resident beach dogs were equally placid, calmed by the endless quantities of unhealthy food offered by the beachgoers from under their rented umbrellas. Just a few steps from the beach a local woman was frying up fish dinners for hungry consumers and offering toilet facilities and end-of-day outdoor showers for the equivalent of about fifteen cents.
At the other end of the spectrum, we bought a day at a Westin Resort for the price of a fancy meal at their outdoor restaurant. Here on the white sand beach, restaurant waiters carried drinks and dinners to the well-heeled clientele. It was a different kind of fun, but we were grateful to return to the private pleasures of our well-appointed Airbnb.
One day we drove an hour down the coast to a small town which promised two attractions outside the tourist bubble. First there was the 16th century house/palace of Ponce de Leon – yes, that very guy in search of the elusive Fountain of Youth who was the governor of the region for several years – with walls thick enough to ward off any attacks by the local Taino population. Closer to town the waterfront featured several open-air fish restaurants that attracted large local families out for a Sunday treat. No American restaurant offered the amenity of a quarry-like swimming hole where the brave could jump in from the rocks surrounding the pool.
As I mentioned earlier, the trip was planned in two parts – the beach for pure pleasure and the city for history, culture and political context. The trip to Santo Domingo was a two-hour drive, which featured one of the most interesting rest stops anywhere, all cleverly constructed of shipping containers. It was a welcome respite before we hit the metropolis of three million plus residents. Ben was doing the driving and navigating the narrow, traffic-clogged city was so trying that we decided to park the car and rely on the very efficient and cheap Uber service that blanketed the city.
It’s not worth too many details but the second Airbnb was not as advertised. It was comfortable and spacious enough, but the promised details bore little relationship with the promotion. For example, we were attracted by the mention of elevators, a must for mobility-challenged Rosellen, which served parts of the building complex that we were not assigned to. Enough said. We spent a delightful day in the city’s Botanical Gardens and walked through the colonial zone, consisting primarily of buildings also dating to the early sixteenth century. From this base, Christopher Columbus, his brother and son governed the surrounding territory, as well as all of Spain’s holdings in the New World. Most of us who were cheated out of a proper history education might not be aware that Mr. Columbus never set foot on the American continent. The DR was as close as he got.
On our final full day, the reports of rain led us to plan indoor activities. Our first stop was a small museum in the Zona Colonia which was devoted to the dictatorship of the notorious Rafael Trujillo and his eventual murder at the hands of Resistance Fighters. The displays and the story they told were an important antidote to the mindless touristic pleasures that dominated our brief week’s stay. It was interesting to note that Trujillo changed the name of SD to Ciudad Trujillo (sound familiar?) which was immediately changed back to the original after his death. Does it come as a surprise that we were the only people in attendance?
We had planned to spend the rest of the day on the campus of three major museums, only to discover they were closed for the New Year’s holiday, so after a long, leisurely lunch at what was reputed to be the oldest tavern in the New World (1505), we retired to our apartment for a relaxed afternoon and evening, eating the leftovers from several restaurants (that definitely cut down on expenses), including one that featured a live merengue band, watching TV and talking till the fireworks covered as much of the horizon as we could see. Dalia set the tone by asking us to talk about our siblings, a subject of fascination for this only child. These hours were what I really came for. It gave me and Rosellen enormous pleasure to witness what a thoughtful, insightful, open and mature young woman Dalia is in the process of growing into. If our bones are still above ground next winter, we will call on Hoffman and Hoffman travel agents for a new round of travel plans. I would relish another shot at those final hours.
