R&R in Punta Cana

Brandon and I had decided that we wanted to do a week-long vacation in summer of 2019.

Originally we had been set on going to Barcelona, but the idea of an all-inclusive vacation was becoming more and more tempting. No planning, significantly less expensive, we could go somewhere with sun and palm trees. I’d never had that kind of vacation before – just sitting by a pool with a cocktail for a week.

So, in early 2019, we booked our trip to Dreams Royal Beach Punta Cana for September and started counting the days.

Enjoying my first piña colada on the beach.

I was honestly kind of worried about an all-inclusive vacation because I’m the kind of person who likes to explore cities and tick things off a to-do list for the day. An all-inclusive could get boring after a couple of days. Oh how wrong I was – it was very easy to get used to our new routine of hitting the breakfast buffet, then having piña coladas in the pool until dinner.

It was also nice and quiet because we arrived the week school typically starts up again, so families and parents had other places to be besides paradise. Which meant lovely silence for us.

Another fun perk was that, because we told the resort staff the trip was a celebration of our second anniversary, they provided us with a complimentary bottle of champagne. On our second night at the resort, we took them up on that champagne and enjoyed it from the whirlpool tub on our balcony.

Maybe now is a good time to explain where I came from. My family never had a lot of money. I thought vacations like this, or vacations in general, were not something I would experience in my lifetime.

Something like this was far too fancy for either me or Brandon. The fact that we saved up this money and went on a trip to a beautiful island where we got free champagne and got to sit in a balcony whirlpool tub was wild. We don’t do things like this, and I didn’t think I’d ever have the chance. But here we were.

Once the trip started approaching quickly, I was looking up the resort, and I decided there was one real indulgence I wanted to participate in; I wanted to drink a piña colada from a pineapple. I love me some pineapple, and that just seemed like the most tropical thing that, again, I could never imagine actually doing. I had piña coladas every day on our vacation, but we only got a couple of pineapples filled with the good stuff. I appreciated every sip.

I also just loved being in a place with palm trees and sun. Oh the sun. It was a solid 35 degrees Celsius every day (40 with humidity – it was about 10 back home), and I was soaking it up. As you can tell from the above photo, Brandon’s body was not as big a fan of the heat. He had to wear a t-shirt outside after day one, when he burned to a crisp despite using half a bottle of sunscreen.

I miss the heat every day since returning from Punta Cana.

Sharing a drink by the pool

We spent seven days doing the same thing over and over: breakfast buffet, drink in the pool until noon, grab lunch, drink in the pool until about 4:00 p.m., go back to the hotel room for a nap, get dressed for dinner, then come back to the room and watch Netflix until we fell asleep. As someone who has spent every single day of my life being a ball of stress, doing essentially nothing for a week was beautiful and so, so relaxing.

Brandon and the Dominican sunrise.

To end the perfect trip on a perfect note, Brandon thought it would be romantic if we took a walk on the beach on our last night there and watch the sunset (which was indeed the most romantic thing). The next morning, we woke up at 5:00 a.m. to watch the sunrise before hitting the breakfast buffet and packing up our things to head back to the airport.

Walks on the beach on our last night (I have never been this tan in my life)

If this trip taught me anything, it’s that everyone deserves to relax. Everyone deserves to spend some time with a loved one and be completely unproductive sometimes. The world didn’t stop. Work went on without me. But I came out the other end feeling so incredibly well-rested in a way I didn’t think was possible.

I still love exploring cities and seeing architecture and discovering cute cafes, so I don’t think I would spend my money on these kinds of trips often – but every few years, I could see us putting the world on hold and spending a week under the sun, indulging in piña coladas.