Tag: Dining at Club Med

Accommodations, DESTINATIONS, Photography, Real Estate Photography, Restaurants & Bars, TRAVEL, United States

Mornings at Sandpiper Bay

Jane Sadek

TRAVEL THERE – YOGA AND WORK

One of the things I did like about our stay at Sandpiper Bay was the morning yoga. Since I always wake up long before Bill, I am at loose ends until he does. Reading is always a great way to spend my time, but if there’s a gym, I will take advantage of it. What is a hassle at home is a pleasant distraction on the road.

Yes they had a very nice gym at Sandpiper Bay, one of the very best facilities offered there, but they also had morning yoga at the Zen pool. That was my cup of tea. I’d go by the dining room, eat my breakfast bar from home and get a little caffeine to start my day, and then head to the Zen pool.

The instructors were contractors who came and stayed at the resort. Part of their compensation was their room and board. I lucked out the week I was there. Our yoga lady was a pleasant grandmotherly sort who gave us a very pleasant, easy going workout without all the nasty down dogs. I really enjoyed it. Then it was time to go back to the room and work a little.

Time to Work

If the wi-fi is working, my morning tasks for our business are easy. Download the images from the editors, format them for our clients and let Bill inspect them. If anything needed touch-ups or enhancements, he’d do them. Then I upload them and email them off. Easy peasy!

When we’d gone to Club Med Punta Cana, our business had been much smaller and Bill was our only photographer, so we just shut down for a few days. Having to work on vacation is a sign of our success and we are grateful for it, so we don’t like to complain, but I can complain about Sandpiper Bay’s free wi-fi.

Because we were having such a busy season, these tasks were taking up a little more of my mornings than usual, but it was no big deal – if the internet is working. At Sandpiper Bay, the internet was never quite robust enough for downloading and uploading images.

Each day, I’d start the job and it would look as if this time it was going to work, until it didn’t. Then we’d call the office, they’d apologize and tell us they were having technical problems. Then they’d tell us to come down to the desk and pick up a code for the premium internet – which always worked.

Why didn’t we just pay for the premium internet? Why would we pay for premium internet? Wi-fi was supposed to be a part of our package. A Club Med vacation is no bargain. With sub-par food and entertainment that was a joke, why would we want to give them more money? A better question is this, since the regular internet never worked, why didn’t they offer everyone premium internet or at least hook us up until the end of our stay? Nope, that wasn’t the way it worked.

Tricky Timing

We guarantee 24 hour turn around to our clients and usually deliver hours before that. We can do that because our editors are on the other side of the world. We send off the photos at the end of our day, which is the beginning of theirs and they send back the finished product at the beginning of our day. Only those times are based on our activities at home.

To complicate matters, you might remember we’d just lost our favorite editors earlier in the month. They were good editors, but I loved them because they delivered to me very early in the morning. When I hit my office between 5 & 6 AM, they edited photos were always in my inbox. The new editors promised our images by 9:30 and with luck we’d get them an hour or so before that.

On Florida time, everything was running an hour behind and Sandpiper Bay shut breakfast down at 9:30. Crazy right? I’d come back to the room from yoga and crank up my email waiting for the photos to arrive. When they got there, we’d fight the battle of the internet and try to get the images delivered before we started our vacation day, but it was a tight squeeze.

Breakfast is probably Bill’s favorite meal of the day, but he likes it best at say, 11, especially on vacation. At Sandpiper Bay lunch started at 11, so breakfast was truncated. In truth, their breakfast offerings were always mediocre anyway, so I was glad I had my breakfast bar before yoga. Poor Bill was newly disappointed every morning as we ran in at the last minute from all the uploading and downloading.

While I’m on the subject of work, the other end of the day was easier. The photographers email me a link and I email it on to the editors. I could do that from my phone by the pool. There were still phone calls and texts to answer, problems to solve and such, but for the most part, if the darned internet had worked, then handling our business remotely would have been a breeze.

With work done and breakfast behind us, it was time to enjoy the activities offered around the pools and lagoon of Sandpiper Bay. Come back next week and I’ll share some highlights.

Accommodations, ART, Attractions, DESTINATIONS, Music, Performing Arts, Restaurants & Bars, TRAVEL, United States

Dining and Entertainment at Sandpiper Bay

Jane Sadek

TRAVEL THERE – DEFINATELY NOT ON PAR WITH PUNTA CANA

The Dining Room

The happy face you see above only appeared one time in the dining room at Sandpiper Bay and when he actually sat down to eat this delicious looking crepe, he was sadly disappointed.

At Punta Cana we had three delicious choices for dining and we thoroughly enjoyed them all at various times. If it was a buffet meal, the tables were burdened with delicious choices. Whether we should blame stingy management or Covid, we’re not sure, but the one choice we had for meals at Sandpiper Bay was disappointing by comparison.

At Punta Cana, we wandered around multitudes of bounteous tables. We had a large plate in our hands and were allowed to serve ourselves whatever we wanted as much as we wanted. At Sandpiper Bay, they hid the food behind those irritating cough panels and dished up scanty servings of whatever was on for that particular meal.

At Punta Cana, you could always find a waitperson to get you more wine, more silverware, another napkin, whatever you needed. It wasn’t exactly five star service, but it was adequate. At Sandpiper Bay, you were virtually on your own. We figured out where they kept the opened bottles of wine and served ourselves most of the time, but the wine wasn’t as good as Punta Cana either.

At Punta Cana, meal time was one of our favorite events. At Sandpiper Bay we were lucky if we found enough of anything we liked to keep from being hungry. Not exactly the luxury experience we expected.

I hate to keep kicking Sandpiper Bay around the room, but the dining was a pretty sad situation. Before our four nights were over, we did find things to enjoy, but it just wasn’t the experience we’d anticipated from our previous Club Med stay.

The Entertainment

Another marvelous thing about Punta Cana was the entertainment. The Boss of the Village was almost a natural entertainer and you could tell he made his people rehearse. Night after night we saw great shows. They were not professional, but they were something they could be proud of.

The entertainment at Sandpiper Bay was pitiful. It was so sloppy in its execution that you knew all they’d done is have a verbal walk thru. No one had a singing voice worth anything and instead of being funny, they were silly. And sloppy. Did I mention sloppy? Costumes never fit and were barely pulled up over shorts and bathing suits. Wigs were never combed and always awry. The Boss of the Village was there, but she was among the sloppiest and the silliest. She was barely filling in the blanks, not leading the way to quality anywhere in the resort.

I’m not bothering to catalog menus or describe any of the various shows, because nothing was worth noting. We’d show up each night in hopes of something, anything to eat, to drink, to pass the time, but always left a little hungry and very disgusted. None of the other meals were any better, but it was the evenings which were the most pathetic.

Come back next week and I will try to find something worthwhile to share with you. We were together and we weren’t working all the time, so there were good moments. We just had to make them ourselves, because there was little on offer from the resort.

Accommodations, Attractions, DESTINATIONS, International, Restaurants & Bars, TRAVEL

A Few Final Points

Jane Sadek

TRAVEL THERE: CLUB MED PUNTA CANA IS WAITING

Here’s a few things I didn’t have a place for in other posts about Club Med Punta Cana.  I hope they’ll help you decide you need to go there and visit.  If so, call my friends at CTC Travel.

Dinner A La Carte

You never have to face down a buffet at Punta Cana unless you want to or unless you didn’t get your Indigo reservations in soon enough.  Indigo reservations can only be made in person at the restaurant on the day you want to eat there.  They start taking reservations at 9 AM and if you wait too long, you either won’t get the time you want or you won’t get in at all.

We celebrated our anniversary by having dinner at Indigo.  It was a lovely meal, but Bill made better choices than I did.  He had some kind of whole fish and he says it was one of the most amazing meals he’s ever had.  I had some Dominican shrimp in a plantain bowl.  Good, but not one of the most amazing meals I’ve ever had.  Here’s a few pics from Indigo and that meal.

 Another Dinner Choice

With so much free food and drink available, we didn’t see much reason to spend money that way, but there was one opportunity to do just that.  It was called La Cava.  On the patios of Samana and Hispanolo (for dinner only) there was a section set aside for La Cava guests.  You become a La Cava guest when you purchase wine, whiskey or cigars from La Cava and enjoy them with a meal.  If we’d been there longer, we might have considered it, but we did just fine with the included comestibles.

Shopping

There were a few shops at the resort and they had lovely things – but there were no bargains.  Not a single one.  Especially not on larimar, a semi-precious gemstone found only in the Dominican Republic.  The cheapest larimar I found at the resort was a pair of earrings with a tiny piece of larimar hanging from each stud.  The price was $80 and if someone had brought it to me, I would have thought it was some cheap trinket they got for about 5.  So none of my friends got larimar.

At the resort, everything is priced in Dominican pesos and while everyone can tell you how much that is in euros, they are not so good with dollars.  That made shopping quite challenging.  It also almost caused Bill a heart attack when he saw a receipt with a bottom line of 4210.

45

Several years back, Club Med celebrated its 45th anniversary by printing up lots of T-shirts and other items with the number 45.  The items sold like hot cakes  So, when their 50th came, encouraged by the sales of the 45 items, they printed up lots of 50 merchandise.  However, the 50 merchandise was a bust.  They almost had to give it away to get rid of it. but while everyone was rejecting the 50th anniversary merchandise, they were still requesting items with 45 on it.  You’ll see the 45 logo all over the resort on everything from t-shirts and bikinis to flip flops and beach bags.  Vintage 45 items are a status symbol.  We spent a lot of time speculating on the ubiquitous logo and as we asked around, trying to solve the mystery, we discovered there were almost as many answers as their were t-shirts.  Some Americans thought it was for Trump – NOT!  Some French people claimed it was the number of a popular soccer player.  I asked the Chief of the Village and he gave me this skinny.  So, in case you ever go to a Club Med resort and wonder, well here’s the answer.

Farewell to Punta Cana

I think that about covers it.  You should have everything you need to enjoy a resort vacation with Club Med – and I heartily suggest you give it a try.  I’m probably the only person on the face of the earth that wouldn’t think it was the best vacation ever, but my best vacations are devoted to satisfying my inner Museum Girl.

Would we ever return to Club Med Punta Cana?  If we were the sort to repeat destinations, then there is no reason we would not.  It is a beautiful resort with great food and a lot of fun things to do.  We just rarely return to someplace we’ve already been.

So will we ever do Club Med again?  It is certainly a possibility, but we’d probably only go for three nights, not five.  We had a great time, but while Bill is more active at sports than I am, neither of us prefer sports for days on end.  I can see us doing it before or after a vacation devoted to all my museums, palaces and historic sites or just getting away for a few day.

Winning the fabulous door prize from CTC Travel certainly gave us a new favorite possibility on our wish list, but we’ve already got the next trip planned.  I’m just not ready to tell you about it yet.  Right now, as I finish up this post it is June, shortly after our Club Med vacation, I have no idea what I’ll be offering up next week on Travel Talk, but please come back.  I promise it will be fun!

DESTINATIONS, International, Restaurants & Bars, TRAVEL

Yummy for your Tummy at Club Med Punta Cana

Jane Sadek

Jane’s favorite lunch

TRAVEL THERE: LET’S DO LUNCH

Breakfast is never my favorite meal of the day and dinner at Club Med Punta Cana was, well, in a word, overwhelming.  Day after day, lunch proved to be the meal I enjoyed most.

Bounteous Buffet

Every day, except the first one, we ate lunch at Hispanola, the buffet dining choice.  I made an exhaustive list of all the things available at breakfast, several weeks ago.  It was the same sort of thing at lunch, but as I’ve said, I preferred the lunch menu.

My favorite lunch was the one pictured above.  The seafood stew had mussels, clams, shrimp and other delicious things.  Also on the plate is a sample of the Dominican Beef I learned to love and a chicken dish of some sort and even if I don’t know it’s name, I can tell you it was good.  And veggies?  Always a wide variety of them, prepared in a myriad of ways.  I love veggies.

I also love bread and cheese.  Those were available in astounding numbers and varieties.  Salads were always being served, but my favorite salad experience was the day I chose what I wanted from the salad bar and a lady tossed it with an amazing vinaigrette and some of the most delicious ripe avocados I’ve ever eaten.

There was a grill offering hamburgers and hot dogs.  A pizza oven produced several different kinds of pizza every day.  The delicious seafood stew came from a seafood grill.  All around the huge buffet were all kinds of delicious choices up to and including peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

If your thing is really dessert – never fear.  The dessert bar was just as awesome at lunch as it was at dinner.  The kids seemed to love the soft serve ice cream, with plenty of sprinkles and chocolate syrup available.  The adults lined up for a selection of freshly made gelatos.  Was there plenty of fresh fruit if you preferred?  Of course, there was.

It was never a good idea to leave your food unattended

My Solo Lunch

Lunch was so good that one day, when Bill was just too tired to make the hike to the restaurant, I went ahead on my own.  It wasn’t as if I was actually  hungry.  I just didn’t want to miss lunch.  The evening meal was lovely, but far removed from the beach.  I preferred to sit in Hispanola, enjoying the gorgeous Caribbean day and the sparkling turquoise water, while I lingered over a delicious meal.

On the other days, when I’d eaten lunch with Bill, there was always another activity cued up right after lunch.  On those days, I stuck to water and soda.  A glass of wine or beer would have put me to sleep.  I wouldn’t have made much of a cheerleader under those circumstances.  For my solo lunch, I allowed myself the luxury of cool white wine.  It made everything perfect.

Yes, the Meals Were Great

In case you haven’t caught the drift of it yet, one of the best things about Club Med Punta Cana is the spectacular food offerings.  I came home with a few extra pounds, but I love my friends at CTC Travel anyway!  There’s only a few more things I need to share.  Come back next week and we can probably wrap up our stay.

DESTINATIONS, International, Restaurants & Bars, TRAVEL

Breakfast Choices at Club Med Punta Cana

Jane Sadek

Morning at Indigo

TRAVEL THERE: TO BUFFET OR NOT TO BUFFET

Mornings came with a choice – Indigo Beach Bar & Grill where you ordered from the menu or Hispanola, a buffet.  Both were great and both offered unique experiences.

Indigo

Our first morning, we still didn’t have it all figured out.  I didn’t know where Hispanola was or even if it was available, since the day before, our friend in reception said it was closed.  We did know Indigo, because we’d had lunch there and I knew it was near the place where the orientation tour was supposed to begin.  Decision made.

If you like a great view, a laid back atmosphere and ordering from a menu, then Indigo is the place for you.  We had our first breakfast there and our last, with little to complain about.  The menu is somewhat limited, but there’s an egg choice, a pancake choice, a healthy choice or you can just tell them what you want.  They will deliver a basket of pastries and fixings to the table and/or you can graze from a small buffet with cheese, cold cuts and cereal.

If I was going to complain, I might say the service was a little slow and not exactly four star, but things are so relaxed in Punta Cana that it would almost be ridiculous to complain.  One more thing, if you don’t like runny eggs, then you are in trouble.  The menu says sunny-side up, so I specifically asked if they could flip it over and cook the yolk hard.  The waitress said yes, but the plate delivered said no. Then I looked at the view and decided I could live with it.

Breakfast at Hispanola

Hispanola

Forget everything you ever knew about breakfast buffets!  I’ve had breakfast buffets all over the world and never in my life did I ever see such variety.

  • A grill for the egg, bacon and sausage crowd
  • A huge table with every sort of bread to slice that you can imagine
  • The entire front of the facility was one long buffet with everything from the most gorgeous pastries you have ever seen to oatmeal to pork & beans – and everything else in-between – but that was only the beginning.
  • Another buffet offered sweet breakfast treats, like pancakes, crepes and Belgian waffles.  For some reason that’s also where you’d find cheese quesadillas.
  • Another vast expanse offered toast, muffins, English muffins, bagels – all the stuff you like to heat up before you enjoy and yes they had a toaster.
  • One section had dried fruits, cold cuts, nuts – probably pickled herring – but I never got very close to that table.
  • An entire bar of fruits – all fruits, every fruit – juiced, sliced and whole.
  • A dairy bar with my precious cheeses in a wide variety, as well as milk, cream, yogurt and cold cereal

In other words, breakfast at Hispanola was an event.  We’d enjoy our morning repast out on a covered patio, but in reality the whole thing was one huge open-air facility.

And this is where I have to mention the flies.  Al fresco dining is a wonderful thing, but there is nothing you can do about the flies.  Even though Samana is not actually open air, they leave both sets of double doors wide open all the time.  It’s not like the buffets were fly-covered or even that you were pestered by flies, but if you are going to melt-down because a fly might have crawled on your beignet, I’d say you should skip Club Med Punta Cana.  I’m no fly lover, but having come from the food industry, Bill is more particular.  He just sucked it up and lived with it, but he didn’t like it.

Great Mornings

Whether you choose Indigo or Hispanola, breakfast at Club Med is a great way to start the day.  I confess, I did not work out every morning at Punta Cana the way I do at home, but I don’t walk all day at home the way I did in Punta Cana.  I have to say that waking up whenever you darned well please and strolling over to a beautiful breakfast is a pretty nice life.

As I said grace over my morning meal, I’d say a little thank you for CTC Travel that had made it all possible.  Come back next week and we’ll talk about how we kept ourselves busy during the day.

Accommodations, DESTINATIONS, International, Restaurants & Bars, TRAVEL

Dinner is Delightful at Club Med Punta Cana

Jane Sadek

Dessert was Divine

TRAVEL THERE: SAMANA, THE INTERNATIONAL BUFFET

I have no complaints about Club Med Food.  I liked some things better than others, but there was not a thing available that was anything but good.  Meals were delicious all day long, but dinner at Samana was something special.

Bon Jour & Bon Appetite

After our visit to Cielo, we’d stroll across the patios to Samana and climb the stairs.  Just inside the doors we’d be greeted by a delightful lady we came to recognize by sight – even if we doubted she recognized us at all.

We’d tell her there were two of us and she’d find us a table.  You could sit wherever you wanted, but we discovered we needed the hostess.  One night we arrived and she wasn’t standing there, so we wandered around on our own.  A bit later we came back to the door, happy to see her waiting, feeling quite silly for having tried to seat ourselves.

As soon as we had a table, a server would appear and offer us a beverage.   Bill would get red wine and I would get white.  Then we’d disappear off to the many, many buffet table.  We didn’t stick to a particular order for our food.  We’d wander about and pick the things that interested us most.  I think the first night was by far the best, Beef Wellington, escargot, veal and much more.

Confession, I ate more cheese, morning, noon and night, than anyone probably ever should – but it was SO good.  There’s a reason I don’t keep a variety of cheeses in my frig – I would eat them.  Mozzerella, Blue, Gouda, Swiss, Emmantala, Tontine, Farmers, Feta, Brie – along with amazing breads, dried apricots, nuts and more.  I ate enough that it should have been all I ate, but this was vacation, right?

The menu rotated every night. Around the central area,

  • a huge section for appetizers, mostly fresh seafood and shellfish
  • cheese and bread
  • the next section would vary by evening.  The section next to the bread would vary with the evening and then the desserts would begin.
  • An inner circle would offer very international dishes, like tempura, sweetbreads, Mongolian bbq, schwarma, enchildas etc. etc. etc.

The back wall had

  • a salad bar
  • a pasta bar
  • a section for grilled seafood
  • then grilled meats and other entrees, like the Beef Wellington or Halibut Oscar
  • one corner had a pizza oven offering fresh slices – very popular with the kids
  • a section with Dominican foods.

In my youth I went with a group of my college friends to an all-inclusive resort – a Jack Tar Village on Grand Bahama.  Eating was no problem.  You couldn’t eat all the food they offered, but beverages were a whole ‘nother thing.  The beverages were supposed to be included and you could usually manage to get one, but good luck getting refills.  Thankfully, we discovered a rum factory nearby and dosed ourselves quite liberally with coconut rum, but could get little of anything beverage-wise from the staff.  We also discovered the vending machines had beer.  I didn’t have any of that, but I think our group had cleaned out every beer out of every vending machine before the week was over.

There was no stinginess with alcohol at Club Med.  All throughout dinner the waitstaff kept our glasses filled – both the wine and the water.  It wasn’t fine wine, but it was fine – if you know what I mean.  The guest population of the resort was primarily French, if you remember, so I doubt Club Med could get by without the good stuff.  I noticed that most people were drinking rose’, something that surprised me.  I knew it was becoming a thing over here, but apparently the French like it, too.

After dinner there would usually be entertainment, so come back next week and enjoy the shows with us.  I can’t sign off without another thank you to CTC Travel.  Thanks so much, we loved Club Med.