Travelling to the Dominican

Our travel's were mostly uneventful, but not without incidents worth reporting!

This is what time I went to bed on Friday night.  (Oh yes, I was already writing blog posts in my head then :) )

This is what time Rob went to bed.  The fact that one had an extremely early flight out of Toronto was no reason to skip hockey!

This is the time we saw, once our sleep-deprived minds registered the incessant beeping, and I was awake enough to get another picture...

We arrived at the airport around 4:00am, but we parked in a self-serve lot, and had to wait about 10 minutes for the shuttle to come.  We entered the terminal, and stopped in shock - the lineup was insanely long!  I was a little paranoid that we would miss our flight!  The line snaked around 3 times, plus a long extension.  This picture was taken after we'd been waiting for 15 or 20 minutes.  It was about 5:20am before we checked in, which was exactly one hour before the scheduled departure time.  If the airline was strict, we would have barely made it, as cutoff time for check in was one hour prior to departure.  The long lineup was due to the fact that the airline had 5 flights departing withing 30 minutes of each other.

As we were slowly progressing through the line up, we noticed suitcases piling up by the checkin desks, and came to the conclusion that the luggage conveyor wasn't functioning.  By the time we checked in, apparently the conveyor belt had been down for well over an hour.  Ten or fifteen minute interruptions are apparently common, but an hour and fifteen minutes was a recipe for major delays.

The lineup for security was minimal compared to the checkin lineup and we made it through without incident, and were on the plane by 6:20, the scheduled departure time.  That's when our pilot spoke to us, and said due to the conveyor problems, our plane was missing 36 pieces of luggage.  Great.  How many of our 3 pieces of luggage were among that 36?  The pilot had been told that the luggage should be sorted out in 15 or 20 minutes.  He indicated he didn't quite believe that, and promised to let us know when he learned more.  About half an hour later, he told us the good news that we were now only missing 29 pieces of luggage!  As I was sitting right above the little conveyor belt used to carry the suitcases up to the plane, I decided to start counting them whenever the baggage handlers brought a few more.  Over the next hour or so, I counted about 30 pieces of luggage, including one that I believe was ours!  Finally at 8:30, after sitting on the plane on the tarmac for 2 hours, we departed, still without all the luggage, but for some reason (I didn't catch it) we couldn't wait any longer and off we went.  Thankfully all our luggage was on the plane, and we collected it without incident once we landed.  For the passengers who's luggage didn't make it, a second flight from Toronto was scheduled for later that afternoon, and their luggage was supposed to be on that plane.

While in flight, Rob noticed that we were over Washington DC, and was able to snap a picture.  For security reasons, the pilot couldn't tell us our route, but Rob still recognized this!

This was our first view of land after a couple hours of flying over the Atlantic...isn't that turquoise water pretty?  Courtesy of Google Maps, this is the Grand Turk Island, part of the Turks and Caicos Islands.

And our first view of the Dominican Republic!  We even inadvertently took a picture of our resort on the far right.

A fellow passenger offered to take a picture of Rob & I at the beginning of our holiday...

At the airport in Puerta Plata, waiting for all the other passengers to arrive at the bus which would take us to our resort, the Riu Mambo.

The bus ride was about 40 minutes long, and driving is quite the adventure there!   The road is about 3 lanes wide, one "lane" for each direction, plus a "lane" in the middle where whoever gets there first goes.  Our bus driver honked regularly at other vehicles (mopeds, cars, dumptrucks, you name it) to get out of his way, because he was coming through!  It wasn't terribly frightening, but certainly very different!

Once we arrived at the resort we were greeted warmly, and offered a refreshing drink of mango juice - yummy! 

Official check-in time wasn't until 3:00, and our room wasn't ready, so we headed off for a quick lunch, (it was about 2:40 local time), and when we came back our room was ready.  Which was great, we were ready for shorts and sandals and time to explore!

The Dominican Republic occupies about 2/3 of the Hispanola island, with Haiti being the other 1/3.  During our stay, we heard next to nothing about the situation in Haiti.  There were a couple signs about donating money or goods, but it was very low key.  One of our tour guides said that the main quake was felt in Puerta Plata, but nothing more than that.  Puerta Plata didn't have any damage, as the quake was fairly mild there, so far from the epicenter.  The local TV stations were all in Spanish, so we don't know what information was being given from that medium.

That was our Saturday...it was an early night for us, as we'd had so little sleep the night before...