SAMANA

After such a horrible winter, my daughter and I packed our things and left without remorse for the easter holidays... Why not just escape to the beach and enjoy the warmth of the sun?  It was wonderful to return to such a beautiful place!

 

PUNTA CANA

We decided last September that we would travel to the Dominican Republic for the Christmas holidays.  This was our third time to the island but our first to Punta Cana.  We stayed at the Ocean Blue and Sand by H10 hotels.  The hotel is beautiful with a grandiose lobby area, an impressive pool and very well maintained grounds.  The rooms are spacious and clean.  There are many excellent restaurants, especially the steak house and the buffet offers a wide variety of dishes.  We really enjoyed ourselves and had a great time.  The weather was simply fantastic... And so were the sunrises!

Ocean Blue and Sand hotel

SAMANA

We travelled to Samana for the 2012 Christmas holidays.  We discovered a very beautiful region of the Dominican Republic located on the Atlantic coast in the Northeastern part of the island.  The landscape can be described as being very pure, wild and authentic since tourism is not very developed in that region. I anticipate that this will soon change with the opening of the new El Catey International Airport, in 2006. The drive from the airport to the resort is magnificent and driving through the mountains while admiring the coast lined with palm trees is just extraordinary, something to be seen.

SANTA FE

My husband received an invitation to attend a 4 day conference at the Four Seasons Resort Rancho Encantado in Santa Fe, New Mexico, last June.  To be perfectly honest, I would never have picked Santa Fe as a weekend destination, as it is very far from our hometown of Montreal and not worth all the travelling for 4 little days...  or so we thought...  That being said, this trip would give us a chance to get away from it all: work, kids, school and homework, chores, end of school year activities and temporarily focus on having fun, just the two of us, like the good old days.

Ultimately, Santa Fe was a fantastic destination.  I would never have imagined that New Mexico was so beautiful.  The desert landscape,  the climate, the deep blue sky, the vegetation, the architecture, everything was so different from what I was used to in Montreal.  Visiting the Georgia O'Keefe museum was also an amazing experience, since I had always admired her beautiful paintings.  We also enjoyed exploring the petroglyphs and dwellings carved into the rock cliffs of Bandelier National Monument, Santa Fe's farmers market, shops, art galleries and great restaurants.  We promised each other that we would soon return for a longer stay.