Thursday on vacation in Punta Cana

We're keeping busy in Punta Cana...

A picture of our room after housekeeping had made it up - the housekeeper folds the blanket and puts flowers on it in a different way each day. If you look past the end of the bed, you may be able to see that the end of the room near the sliding glass door is lower than the other part of the room...

... but when you're right near it, the steps are not super visible (yes, there are two steps in that picture)...

... so we put shoes across the top step to remind us to be aware of the down steps!

We don't carry our phones with us a lot of the time because we don't want to leave them on a chair when we go in swimming. In the morning, we participated in a stretching class with Estefania, then a dance class with different member of the staff, then water exercise again with Estefania.

In the afternoon, we joined another dance class with Estefania -- she is the dynamo at the front of the group teaching us another dance step!

I grabbed Carl's phone and took a few pictures of him doing the dance lesson on the back row...

... an action shot!

Since he and the lady next to him are on the same step, I think he is keeping up well! He says that in school, with a last name of "Williams", he was always in the back of the classroom, so anywhere else feels uncomfortable. I get so tickled as we are trying these different things, and so many times he is either saying or expressing the same thing I am thinking, like when Estefania showed us a stretch in the morning, he said (and I echoed), "That ain't gonna happen!" Or loud groans or grunts or giggles while trying to bend our bodies in ways that we haven't tried to bend in years and years!

The stretching instructor on Wednesday (*not* Estefania) had the class putting our legs up in the air and then up over our heads -- like doing a head stand but on our shoulders. We each thought... I used to do that when I was young... I wonder if I can still do that? The answer is, "No! You can't do that and you should not do that!"

After dance class, we were quite warm, so we went to the bar/drink area by the beach and enjoyed re-hydrating with water. We had wondered if we'd be okay drinking the water and eating raw fresh vegetables (lettuce, tomatoes) -- so far we seem to be having no digestion problems.

In the lobby of the hotel, we saw this bench/couch that Carl thought looked like a Cray supercomputer (see here for a comparison).

A view of the lobby from the second floor (another "Cray computer" couch in the foreground).

The inner courtyard in our building

We had supper at the steak restaurant on site - we ordered salmon and beef filet and then cut each of our meats in half and so we each got to have "surf and turf". It was all very delicious!

After supper, we went to the beach and sat in lounge chairs enjoying the sound of the waves. The clouds were pretty (though not as bright as they appear in the picture).

Lit up pathways as we headed back to our room.

We're enjoying participating in activities while here, trying to not overeat and to not get too sunburned!