In The Dominican Republic, It’s All About Family

Eden Roc Cap Cana Brings People Together. 

The last time we had all taken a trip together was over a decade ago, before my children were born, before my father died. In those Before Times, I had envisioned a certain kind of travel with kids. Maybe my father settling into a book just before the compulsion hit to cannonball into a pool with my kids. I had to learn to parse that nonexistent present with the real one: a villa at the 67-key Eden Roc Cap Cana, in the Dominican Republic with the people who are still very much alive, my stepmother, sisters, and attendant significant others, a full and noisy house of family. We are all still here, is the point, even if we’re a little incomplete. 

When my sons were born, a few years in the aftermath of the loss of my father, I wondered if we would ever be able to replicate the type of travel I had enjoyed as a kid, the messy kind of family travel that we both loved and hated, that my father found both aggravating and satisfying (in adulthood, I can see it now). I wondered, in his absence, if I could ever produce for my children the same memories. All parents wonder this, of course, but something larger looms over you when you have lost this large part of yourself. A parent. 

But we were in luck. At Eden Roc at Cap Cana — a Relais & Chateaux property — we owned the Imperiale Villa for exactly one week, spilling into the pool, driving golf carts the way we once had during a family vacation in Jamaica, back when my cousins and I were just old enough to drive. Our villa had rooms for all of us. It had Champagne and tiny cans of aloe drinks with pulp floating in it. There was a fruit platter set out. Cubes of cheese. The joys of vacation were not quickly lost on me. 

With our included golf carts, we zipped over to La Palapa, one of the resort’s on-premises dining concepts. Open-air and overlooking the brilliant and aquamarine sea, La Palapa was the antidote to a chilly Northeastern winter. The seafood? A no-brainer. But the spaghetti pomodoro and basilico — tomato and basil — was a sleeper hit that none of us had expected. 

Maybe pasta in the Caribbean isn’t what you think you need, but I’m here to relate that it’s exactly that: a comfort to anyone who didn’t realize that the best things in life are a little soft and soothing and unexpected, like the sun sinking into the sea just as you take that perfect bite of spaghetti pomodoro on a sultry Dominican evening. Wispy palm trees, dancing in delight. Children sleepy, though not sleeping. Coloring books not quite exhausted. You know the vacation drill. We watched a wedding unfold at a gazebo adjacent to the restaurant, and the party threatened to go on well after our own respective bedtimes. 

By morning, we were ready to do it all again. The Imperial Villa came with its own private cabana on the beach, room for our lounging group to sit on the beach and sun or read in the shade or amble toward the dual pools or toward the sea. My kids found floats in the shapes of alligators and tossed themselves into the waves. We ordered piña coladas and coconuts plucked fresh from a nearby tree and repeated this day after day. 

Vacation is about ritual. Vacation is about habit. Eden Roc made good-natured sun-seekers out of us. We followed the big orb in the sky, let it dictate our passions and persuasions. We ate and drank and toggled between the resort’s restaurants. For formal dinners: Mediterraneo, where we ate lamb and foie gras and tiny little gnudi in consommé. At Blue Grill + Bar: raw fish of all stripes, grilled Caribbean lobster.

My father wasn’t there, but it was, in a sense, the embodiment of one of his vacations. We had all come together again at the perfect moment in the perfect place, paradise found. There would be cannonballs, yes, though not from him. We would still ride the waves, read the books, order the coladas. The hole of his absence never fully patched, I’ll admit, but if the best you can do is find a place that feels great in moments that feel both bitter and sweet, at this I’ll say we succeeded.