Travels With Hannah: Coming Home to Caneel Bay

We had not vacationed together as a family since right after my father died, in 2011, which meant that we had not vacationed together as a family since my two children, Miles and Nathaniel — 5 and 7 — were born. Sometime last year, Rima, my stepmother, started talking about a large-format family vacation, the kind where all of us (her, my two sisters, my husband, me, my kids, my sister’s partner) could all fly off to some far-flung island for a week in the sun.

We had done this, actually, on repeat. When my father was alive, our destination of choice was Caneel Bay, on St. John, a resort opened by Laurance Rockefeller in the 1950s. When my father died, we went back, one last time, to spread his ashes in the jet stream. This time, taking the advice of friends, we booked the four-bedroom Imperiale Villa at Eden Roc Cap Cana, a Relais & Chateaux property in the Dominican Republic that could accommodate our big group.

My traveling schedule being what it is, I had not had much time, over the course of the past years, to do what I like to do most: plant myself in the sand for seven days with books, sweet cocktails, and the company of people I love, and do, well, not much of anything at all.

Our villa had rooms upstairs and down. We were greeted by hats and beach bags — enough for adults and children. A bottle of Champagne awaited us, as did cheese, fruit and assorted snacks. The backyard of the villa was entirely aquamarine pool, a vision in the afternoon heat, when you’ve just left frigid Boston with two children under 8.

The first night, we took our golf carts (included) over to La Palapa, one of the resort’s multiple on-premises dining concepts. La Palapa is open-air and overlooking the water. I had been tipped off by a friend: Order the spaghetti pomodoro and basilico — spaghetti with tomato and basil.

To be honest, it wouldn’t have been my first choice, but actually, it took me back to my first-ever adult summer in the Hamptons, the year that Scott Conant opened Tutto il Giorno in a tiny space on Bay Street. A friend of mine was the general manager, and I had only ever been out east once before, as a child. I came in and sat at the bar, and Conant’s legendary pasta, threaded through with butter (his recipe was a riff on Marcella Hazan’s, but I didn’t know that then, either) stayed with me, like the permanent glow that lived on that part of Long Island from May through August.

Oh, and maybe that pasta brought me back a little bit, made me nostalgic for the Hamptons, or the way it used to be. Everyone likes to wallow in the good old days, and that includes me, too. Being on vacation, anything can be the good old days; La Palapa is the good old days personified, pasta sauce sticking to the ribs of its pasta, the sun disappearing in a wisp of cloud behind tipsy palm trees, a boisterous Saturday night wedding that doesn’t even seem to notice that we’re practically part of it. Good old days, indeed.

In the morning, we shuffle over to the beach, post-prandial-style, a little rounder from breakfast — my kids have found the pastry station, after all — only to discover the greatest luxury afforded by our villa, a private cabana with sublime access to the beach. It has a raised wooden platform that spares our feet the indignity of hot sand, as well as plenty of loungers and couches and seats, both in shade and in full-sun. Every half hour or so, an attentive server pops by to see if we’d like a cocktail, or a mocktail, or a plate of ceviche. Their service is expedited by a white flag that my boys have discovered, now flying at full mast behind the couch. (We apologize and order more piña coladas.)

Every day is mostly like this: drinks and food by the ocean, swimming in the pool, swimming in the sea, a languid lunch, a late afternoon departure that stretches into drinks by another pool — this time ours — before dinner, later. Sometimes dinner is casual, at La Palapa, and sometimes it’s more formal, at one of the resort’s other two venues. At Mediterraneo, we order lamb and foie gras and snapper crudo and my children get the same thing they have gotten at every other restaurant all week long: beef sliders.

All week, we live slowly, reading books, making jokes, doing crossword puzzles, sharing space with one another, remembering what it is like to be in a large and wild and untamed family. My kids read “Dog Man” at dinner, draw pictures of characters in crayon. The week goes by slowly, it goes by quickly, before we know it, we are headed back to Boston in pants and sweaters and socks and sneakers. Before we know it, we are planning ahead for the next time we will all be together again.