Samana, DR

Monday morning, hazy, WARM, and the Dominican Republic. Aaah, what a great way to eat breakfast!

We took a boat to Cayenas Beach to spend the day.
The Norwegian Pearl from off ship.
The beach!
The restaurant hut.. rumor had it that they served iguana on a stick, but we checked the menu, and they just had $7 hamburgers. Seeing as how we were only at the beach for 4 hours and had eaten a big omelet breakfast before, we didn't eat on shore... and we definitely didn't partake of the included "fruit punch" that we knew was really rum punch.

We warmed up in the sun, played in the water, walked down the beach and got hassled by the local vendors who weren't allowed on the right side of the pier...
Toes in the sand!

Michael joined in a couple of games of sand volleyball while I read and soaked up some sun, then we played frisbee for a while and had a great time playing in the sand and sun.

Sometime during the first two hours on the beach a boy was out in the water (where we had already walked) and he stepped on a sea urchin. I offered my little bit of medical training if needed, but the dad was a paramedic and had everything under control... an hour later the kid was up and running again, so I guess he was okay.

Then we decided to build a sandcastle, cuz that's one of our favorite things to do with the kids at the beach, so we thought they'd like a picture.

Just when we were starting to get a little too toasted by the sun the boat came back for us and we went back to the ship. We had wanted to take a tender from the ship to the town of Samana, but there wasn't time anymore, and after seeing what the non-cruise-line-operated side of the beach looked like, we were pretty sure we didn't really want to see the town anyway.
Overall it was a nice day in the sun and we loved the palm trees. The water was disappointingly green, murky and full of palm fronds, coconuts, and floating seaweed, and you couldn't walk out more than 10 feet without fear of sea urchins, but hey, we're in the Caribbean, so who cares!