Yearly archives: 2007

My final excursion while in the Dominican Republic was a full day Catamaran excursion. Possibly the best part about this excursion was the fact that it departed from my resort’s beach, so I really didn’t have to displace myself too much in order to make it there on time at 8am. This was a good thing, because I was a little bit worn out from the Tuesday night activities. What were those activities you ask? Well, that was the night I met up with Penelope and Melissa at the beachside grill a la carte restaurant, after which I went to the casino night with Go Travel direct. That turned out to be pretty lame, so I ended up going back to the resort for the nightly show, which ended up being the light-bulb eating dude! That was a good call, and put me in the mood to have a few drinks while I watched. Anyway, long story short, I was definitely ready to hit the ocean the next morning, but not in the mood to join the ‘party’ aspect of the day. Yup, as might be expected, this was no ordinary catamaran. This was the party catamaran! Open bar all day long. However, I didn’t touch a drop till we were actually anchored back at our starting point late in the afternoon. I just couldn’t justify drinking all day. That and the fact that I didn’t know a single soul on the boat, since none of the people I’d met were on this excursion. However, it was still pretty cool. Read on for more.

Alright, so they said that I was a little out of my mind. They said that I had a high risk of getting seriously injured. They said that most people really don’t do what I wanted to. But as you have no doubt asked yourself many times, who exactly are “they”? Of course, I’m talking about the fact that I had decided to do some cycling while I was in the Dominican Republic. After all, I had gone to all the trouble of packing my bike in an airline flight box, dragged it to the resort (literally) and re-built it there the first day. I was staying at a place called Playa Dorado, which is not exactly in Puerto Plata, and just up the road from two places called Sosua and Cabarete. These are two places quite well known as being surf towns, and having great beaches. I didn’t feel like paying the $60+ USD that the organized excursions wanted to charge for going there. Plus, you were stuck on their schedule. Taxis were another option, and would have cost about a quarter that, but really, I was determined to experience at least a little of the Dominican on two wheels. And so I formulated my plan.

The first excursion I signed up for was a ‘Caliente Night’ with Go Travel Direct. As you can imagine, this night was supposed to be hot and spicy. So what exactly is Caliente Night you ask? Well, simply put, it was a pub crawl of northern Dominican. We were set to hop on a converted school bus, and tour around for the night. This bus was no normal bus though. It had a thatched roof, and.. wait for it… a bar at the front! Yup, the Go Travel reps would be serving us from the free-flowing rum onboard. To start, we were heading to Puerto Plata to view the sunset at an old prison. From there, supper in a typical restaurant. Then, the bar hopping began. We would stop at a road-side disco at one point. Next, we were heading East towards Sosua, and ultimately ending up at Cabarete. These are surf towns. Cabarete has the distinction of being the site of the Kite surfing world championships. Neat-o. So, just how did the night shape up? Well, read on, dear friends.

Good day all. When you last left your hero, he had just arrived in Puerto Plata and was looking forward to a week of food, drink, sun and fun. Sadly, your hero has just realized he’s getting waaay behind in his blog posts, and may have to shorten a few posts in order to play catch-up! After all, we’ve got the Dominican to write about, a winter poker night in Calabogie, not to mention a crazy weekend of double races! Whew. Given that on average it takes me an hour just to write one posts, well, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out I’ve got to speed things up. I wonder how much it would cost me to get a ghost writer to do my posts for me? After all, my plan is that once I’m older, I’ll just dump all my blog posts to a ghost writer who’ll then write my best-selling autobiography 😉 Of course, I’ll have to do a few more interesting things first, but I’m working on it! Anyway, back to the beautiful Blue Bay Getaway in Puerto Plata (Playa Dorado to be exact). Let’s see just what I did to pass those lonely days.

Howdy all! I guess it’s high time that I write a bit about my recent last-minute vacation down to the Caribbean, isn’t it? As I mentioned in my last post, as a result of changing jobs, I decided to take a week off between the two jobs to refresh myself. Incidentally, for those of you who are wondering what this new job is, well, let’s just say I opted to stay in the Government for now. I received a promotion in the CRTC, and as such moved up a few floors, got a coveted window cubicle, and have an entirely new workload. Whereas before I was a Senior Analyst, dealing with applications and tariff filings, I’ve now moved into a Network Evolution Policy role. This means that I’m much more self-directed, and will be researching and reporting on a range of interesting topics such as net neutrality, digital rights management, new media, and so on and so forth. As you may imagine, this is much more interesting to me than what I was doing before, so I’m cautiously optimistic about this new post 😉 Staying in the CRTC has also guaranteed that I can still go ahead with my plan to take a leave of absence and head to New Zealand. However, there have been a few high-level changes to it. First, I’m only going for 4 months instead of 6 months. Second, I’ll be leaving at the beginning of December, rather than the beginning of September. Regardless, it’ll still be an awesome trip no doubt, and will carry me through the cold Ottawa winter! Anyway, I’m rambling on about work, when I should be telling you about Puerto Plata. Read on!