For those of you who don't know... I work for Delta. Which means I get free flights going standby. Nate and I planned our Honeymoon to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic (look it up, it is sweet). The problem is that there is only one flight a day to Punta Cana and it goes out of Atlanta. Atlanta is probably the hardest city to get to going standby. So Nate and I planned ahead and decided to give ourselves a day to get there and then stay overnight in Atlanta so we could make our only flight the next day. Nate went as far as buying us confirmed tickets from Atlanta to Punta Cana so we could make that flight. We get to Atlanta and get ready for bed and Nate asks me what time to set the alarm. The flight is at 9:45 AM and so I say 7:00 AM. Next thing we know, we hear a knock at the door from housekeeping. We jump out of bed and see that the clock says 8:45 AM. We grab all of our stuff, looking like zombies we run downstairs to check in at the kiosk in the lobby. The screen reads, "Unfortunately it is too late to check in for this flight, we are sorry for the inconvenience." We drop all of our luggage and take a seat in the nearest chair. Pardon my French but we were screwed. Nate looks at his alarm that he set and it says 7:00 PM!
After searching all the possible options we had, we rented a car and spent the day in Atlanta. We had a little adventure at the underground mall, ate cheesecake factory, shopped at target, and checked into yet another hotel. The next day though, we got on our flight with no issues at all.
The hotel in Punta Cana was super cool. We purchased the club premium package and that gave us access to our own little club room, the spa, any restaurant reservation we wanted, all inclusive room service at all hours of the night, and a fabulous upgrade to a suite. Our room was huge and had all sorts of fun treats. It walked straight out to the adult pool where there were these awesome cabanas. It also had a jacuzzi on the porch. One night when we were in the jacuzzi, I left the door wide open. At about 2 AM I wobbled into the bathroom and screamed. "Nate, get in here!! There is a cockroach!!" He ran in, still half asleep and started smashing the trash can around to kill it. Finally he gave up and put the garbage can upside down over it and said "I will get it in the morning." I didn't sleep all night with the thought that it would crawl out from under it and get in our bed. The next morning Nate did take care of it but it wasn't soon enough for me to get any sleep.
Another issue with bugs were that there were mosquitos. We never really noticed them around until poor Nate started getting red bumps all over his body. Every day we would find 10 or 20 more. If there was a mosquito in our room we would smash it only to find out that it had already bit Nate, because blood would squirt everywhere. It was pretty disgusting. We ended up buying a 20 dollar itch cream for Nate after day 3. I left with about 3 bites and Nate had about 50. There were only a couple body parts that were bite free and his butt was not one of them.
Bugs and bites aside, Punta Cana was beautiful. Nate and I love being beach bums and soaking up the sun so that is pretty much all we did. The ocean was bathwater and the sand was snow white. The resort was all inclusive so we ate a whole lot of food. There was a French restaurant and Japanese steak house that we really liked. The guy made a heart with the fried rice, it was cute.
The plan for the flight home was the 1:00pm flight to Atlanta. We get to the cute tropical (non-airconditioned) airport at 11:00 to find out that the JFK flight has been delayed 3 hours for mechanical purposes and that people have switched their flight to go through Atlanta. So the Atlanta flights were full and our only hope of getting to the US is to go to JFK. The JFK flight was scheduled to leave at around 3pm but with the delay will be more like 5:45. We spent 6 hours in that airport after we went through security. Did I mention non-airconditioned? We got into JFK and checked into yet ANOTHER hotel and literally had 4 hours to sleep before we could make the next flight home to SLC. We went through Phoenix because we wanted to sleep 5 hours instead and the flight looked open. We traveled nearly 8,000 miles on this trip. That is a third of the way around the world. But hey, we got first class!!
Nate and I smiled and laughed through the whole thing until we made it to our hotel in New York. It was completely and totally ghetto. It had 2 miniature beds and so we had to sleep separately and I am sure we probably have bed bugs now. But the point is that we survived and we get to laugh at all of it for the rest of our lives together.
No comments:
Post a Comment