Our Trip South

Okay, so at the request of some friends and family, here are a bunch of pictures from our southern holiday. It seems like forever ago (but it was only a month) since Corey and I headed to the DR for week of fun, sun and relaxation.

We stayed at the Casa Marina in Sosua. It was a lovely hotel, very large. There were three main pools, two children's pools and two private beachs seperated by a beautiful reaf which held four large hot tubs.

This we the view from out hotel room door, we basically walked out onto the pool deck.

The is the pool outside our room where we spent quite a bit of time

Here is the main beach. This was near the end of the day, hence why there is noone on the beach .

Here we are.... all tanned and relaxing...

This is part of the reef... it was really peaceful watching the wave splash up.

This is one of the hot tubs along the reef

Every night they would put on performances in the theater; however one night they closed down the theatre because their was a leak in the roof. This picture was the next day when they were fixing the roof. Remember alot of building in the DR don't have real roofs, they simply use branches. When I took this picture there were a group of men on the room ripping off the old branches, throwing them down to the pile on the ground.... and another group of men preparing bundles of new branches which they would carry on their shoulders while they climbed he ladder up to the roof, where they would attach them. A very neat thing to watch.

We did a few ventures out of our resort complex. One was to through the town of Sosua and their public beach. The was actually about 3 miles long, and the entire three miles was small shops (bargining shacks) where people are trying to sell you stuff. Here is a glimps of the beach.

Our other adventure was a highlight of the trip. We ventured to "Paradise Island". A full day on the road, driving to Isabell Beach, taking a speed boat out to a private island for a traditional Dominican lunch, taking the speedboat through the national park and then to "Paradise Island"

This "Island" is actually a Sandbar in the middle of the ocean that never gets covered by water. It has some of the greatest snorkling, with thousands of fish, eating banana's out of our hands, literally.

I know alot of people ask about food in the DR. Our resort had great food with lots of variety. There were two huge buffets offering food for every meal, two snack bars open all day with pizza, burgers, fries, etc. And three"fancy" resturants. Here is Corey at the Italian resturant...mmmm they had great cheesecake deserts.

Another highlight of our trip was a guy named Ricky. He was the resorts photographer. Ricky took us on three different photo shoots... here are a few of Ricky's pictures.

Okay, so this next picture has a story to it. We were standing on the reef trying to get a picture with the wave behind us. As soon as this wave behand us falls, another wave comes up to our left, it goes over Corey and I and drenches Ricky... and I mean drenches. He was soaked from head to toe, and his camera stopped working. It will definitly be a memorable shoot for Ricky, because he was very, very afraid that his camera was broke for good, but luckily he was able to take it to the camera shop and get it fixed. Needless to say, Ricky said that he will probably stay away from the reef for photo shoots from now on.

And that was our trip in a nutshell....

aww... aren't we cute :)