How I Learned to Love the Hustle

I don't generally do spontaneity well. It's not that I'm a planner, mind you, rather more of an inertialist. So when my wife and I decided to book an all-inclusive Spring Break trip to the Dominican Republic a week before the departure date, I scored it a comfort-zone-shattering win.

And when both of my daughters independently told us that they loved the trip (no small feat to get kids of a certain age to admit doing something with their parents doesn't completely suck), that sealed a lifetime memory for my team. Here's hoping the Zika clears their system before I have small-headed grandbabies.

Given a week to prepare to go someplace we'd never been, and travel in a way I'd never done, we learned a handful of lessons the hard way - or at least the most inefficient way. Here, in no particular order, are some of the things I wish I'd known about in advance:

Tipping customs at all-inclusive resorts

We stayed at the Sunscape Puerto Plata, a nice but not extravagant little joint on the Playa Dorada on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic. I'm guessing it's fairly typical of all-inclusive places - couple of restaurants, bunch of bars (including one in the pool), friendly staff, drunken Canadians, etc. From the moment we got there, I felt awkward about expectations regarding gratuities.

I tried to give the guy that brought our bags to the room $5, but he dropped our luggage and walked away without looking at me. I gave bartenders a buck the first few times I ordered drinks, until I realized that nobody else was doing so. Left 500 (!) pesos (about $11) after dinners - no idea whether that's how it's done. Didn't tip the waitstaff at the buffet restaurant, 'cause it didn't seem like anyone else was.

I was having a better time than my expression might indicate

We went on a couple of excursions, and I gave our guides $10-15 each. Was that right? Fuck if I know. Housekeeping had to come to our room three different times to sort out issues (broke a beer bottle, clogged the toilets - unrelated issues), and I left them $20 when we checked out, but didn't give them anything when they showed up to help because I'd run out of cash and had to leave the resort to go to an ATM.

Didn't tip the Canadians, though. Pretty sure that was the right move.

Techniques for teaching 

children to flush a toilet

Neither of my kids knows how to flush their toilet at home, so why would that be different on vacation. I estimate that I plunge their toilet 3-4 times a week. Or did, before I decided that they're on their own about a month ago. Sure enough, they clogged the toilet in our room at the resort twice, requiring us to call housekeeping each time. On neither occasion did I have cash on hand (see above).

The Hustle is real

My life is overwhelmingly first world, both problems and day to day experiences. The last time I went somewhere remotely 'developing' was when Dave and I traveled to Cancun over Spring Break in college. We stayed in town, away from the resort area, so we got a (very) little taste of local life. We also got taken deep by the 'guide' employed by the company that organized the trip, who steered us to crappy restaurants, convinced us to take a ridiculous boat trip, and pocketed $15 from each of us by telling us we could pay him to take care of expediting our processing at the airport when we flew back home.

That dude hustled us, in the worst sense of the word. In the Dominican, though, while everyone is hustling you, and nearly all the time, it's so transparent, and they're so damn friendly, that it's (almost) enjoyable. We went horseback riding and ziplining out in the country, and our guides basically told us how and when they expected to be tipped. They also detoured our group to a little roadside artisan stand in the midst of some of the most abject poverty I've ever seen and made us get off our bus and browse the wares. I'm sure they were getting a cut, but it hardly mattered.

We went to a place called Ocean World, which had the potential to be a gawdawful tourist clusterfuck, and turned out to be a gem. We swam with dolphins and sea lions, snorkeled, and played with all manner of macaws, toucans, and lovebirds. And when the trainers transparently asked for a little sumpin' sumpin' with big smiles on their faces, we gladly offered it up.

My daughter isn't a ham, at all

The (almost) above would go away, but for the fact that we got snookered into sitting through the resort's vacation club presentation/hard sell. Total rookie mistake, frankly. I finally got us out of it by concocting a story about how lousy we are with money and planning to illustrate the fact that we'd never get any value from a membership. Self-deprecation for the win.

Finally, as we left the Dominican, we were met at the airport by an army of guys wearing 'Volunteer Porter' shirts. Despite my protestations, they grabbed our luggage and shepherded us through the check-in process, which was a bit chaotic (though not as much as it was at Reagan National Airport on our way out of the U.S.). And when I sheepishly told them that I'd literally given my last peso to the driver who'd taken us to the airport, they shrugged, smiled, and went on to the next family. I'm sure they waited until I couldn't hear before they called me a pendejo.

Have I mentioned that the Dominican people are awesome?

All-inclusive is cool, and all, but you need to get out

If I do something like this again, I'm definitely making a point of going out into the local community without a guide or organized group. On both of our excursions, we drove through downtown Puerto Plata, a chaotic, alternately ramshackle and lovely beachside town. Our route took us through the Malecon, a 4km boulevard that runs along the beach. It's lousy with open air restaurants, bars, and little cafes.

I really wish we'd stopped there, 'cause I bet we'd have had a better and far more authentic meal than any of the ones we ate at our resort. Plus, we could've taken Moto Taxis, which are fucking bonkers.

I would recommend not being as much of a douche as this guy while aboard one, though:

Presidente is pretty tasty in a pinch

I was shocked and chagrined to learn that Dominicans don't import exotic IPAs to cater to their elitist Norteamericano tourist clientele. Nah, I wasn't. But it's true that they don't. I sucked it up, though, and found that Presidente, the local pilsner, is pretty damn good on a warm Caribbean day.

You gotta be ready with the camera, man

As we left our room to head out on our horseback riding/ziplining excursion, my little on complained of illness. We made it almost all the way to the lobby of the resort before she barfed into a lovely flowering bush. Since that particular excursion was her idea, and she's the stubbornest kid on the planet, she was determined to make the journey, regardless of how she felt.

She managed to make it all the way to the mountainside venue, and through the 20-minute horseback ride without further incident. And I managed to pull 'agua para la nina, por favor?' from deep in the recesses of my limited Spanish repository to get her some hydration.

She took a little break as we walked to the ziplining starting point, but started to turn a little green as we climbed a ladder to the first platform. She managed to make it through two of the seven stations without incident, but as she whizzed into the third, her stomach rebelled, and she barfed gloriously from a great height.

And me without a camera.

The US Customs entry process at Miami International Airport is a clusterfuck, and I'm an idiot

I understand that security's an important function of our Federal government, and that entering a sovereign nation is a serious thing. And, man, do I get that the good people of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have a tough and thankless job. But holy shit is it a mess to get back into America in Miami. Directions are confusing, lines snake everywhere, the process seems to change and morph on the whims of whichever official one encounters next, and all of this is exacerbated by the hundreds of other tired and confused travelers milling about the same general area.

It took us nearly an hour to wend our way through the various pathways to get beyond a customs inspector, at which point I realized that I am a Global Entry cardholder. Curious, I asked a CBP officer if I could have used my Global Entry status to take my whole family through that significantly expedited process. The answer, should it matter to any of you in the future, is yes.

What a fucking dope.

So in the course of an overwhelmingly positive time, I learned some stuff. Dominican time is different than American time - which is a good lesson about what's really important. Mentioning Pedro Martinez in the DR is a surefire way to get some dap and bond with the locals. Not being a dick to people when you're a visitor to their country is always in style. And probably most significantly, it's still possible for my family to act like we love one another despite sharing close quarters for nearly a week. All it took was a little Dominican sunshine.