2023
For the most part my wife and I have never been particularly crazy party people. We’d prefer to hang out somewhere quiet and chat for hours on end. So when I thought it’d be fun to try something totally out of our comfort zone my wife practically passed out from shock but then cautiously warmed to the idea.
Fast forward to our first day… We show up in jeans and t-shirts and as soon as we walked into the courtyard I instantly felt out of place. I was way over dressed, all I saw were naked bodies everywhere! It took about half a day to get the feel of the place and we were both surprised at how easy it was to fit right in once we changed into our bathing suites.
We ended up at the bar by the lobby, I think it was called the Mélange bar? At any rate, we hung out there and had a blast joking around with the bartender and all the folks who would come around and hung out with us. That ended up being our go to spot for the entire week. People of all backgrounds, sizes and shapes, clothed or not would get drunk with us. It had a goofy summer camp vibe without the annoying camp counselors around.
We also had a great time fooling around in the jacuzzi while everyone was at the disco. We’d sneak over, get nekkid and have a great time. We were shy, but didn’t mind if a few people were around and watched us. That’s about as crazy as we would get that week and it was a good way to get comfortable with the idea of being naked and having sex in public!
By the end of the week, I was brave enough to wear a silly banana hammock (which got a lot of laughs) to the jacuzzi while my wife went topless with a barely there bottom! Honestly, this was a dream come true for us. We decided that we would make DRM our go to vacation spot because we loved it so much.
2024
We were so excited to go this year, we had been talking about it for months and were planning on actually challenging ourselves even more this time around. When we showed up, the new lobby, pool, restaurant were open at that point.
We spent the first few hours walking around and getting a feel for the place, but I started getting a bad vibe from the new side. There was just something off about it all and I couldn’t really put my finger on it. It wasn’t until being around it for a few days that we decided something was genuinely off about the whole experience.
Here’s the biggest kick in the teeth. The old bar where we hung out and had such a great time was gone. They turned it into a coffee bar?! WTF?! NO ONE hung out there. They wanted people to go hang out at the bar on the new side and the problem with that was there was no sense of community. It was too open, and very difficult to just hang out with random strangers.
I wasn’t the only one to think this either, practically every person I spoke with HATED the fact that they closed the old bar. Sadly, that was strike one.
With that being said, we tried hanging out on the new side but it just had such a generic “RESORT” feel. All the beds and chairs were fairly far apart and no one was really mingling. There were groups, and cliques that much was obvious but the whole feel of hanging out with new and random people seemed to be missing on the new side. Every time we went to the original side we’d strike up a conversation with random people and had a good time. That was weird. It almost felt like there were 2 resorts in the same place.
The original side was more relaxed and fun, the new side was very obviously the place you went when you wanted to show off. A ton of people were fully dressed, and a lot of the ladies were wearing designer bikini’s and big jewelry…Almost like they wanted to be seen instead of hang out and have a laugh with the common folk. When I tried to strike up a conversation with some of the people on that side I would get dismissive looks and they’d just walk away. That was a bummer, so we ended up spending most of our time hanging out and laughing with the folks who decided to stay on the original side. That was strike 2 for us.
Strike 3 was a deal breaker for us.
One major thing we noticed was that a bunch of people were taking pictures around the pool. One jerk was actually face-timing someone while we walked past them. They were totally on the phone live streaming all the random naked people at the resort. WTF!!!!
I honestly don’t know what can be done about this. Cellphones are going to ruin DRM all because some asshole refuses to have manners.
Speaking of manners. In 2023 we learned very quickly to let folks know we weren’t in the LS and that always went over very well. People were very respectful, they either kept hanging out with us or they would fade away and that was totally cool.
Unfortunately, we had a bad encounter this year. We were hanging out in the jacuzzi with a bunch of people and some random dude waded over to my wife (who was sitting next to me as we were talking to another couple) put his hands on her knees and literally said “Oh, man I want to eat you out so bad” as he tried pulling her legs apart… She literally told him she wasn’t interested and he had the nerve to keep touching her leg and casually trying to convince her to fool around. He was so rude that we ended up just leaving the area. If that had happened anywhere else I would have decked him, but he was an older guy who obviously had too much to drink and we didn’t want to kill the mood for everyone. I don’t blame the resort for his behavior, you’re always going to have random people doing stupid things like that but honestly having that hanging over our heads and seeing people doing videos and pictures really made us feel like DRM is no longer a laid-back party community. I’m guessing within the next 5 years it’ll end up becoming a bland vanilla resort like Miches, but I genuinely hope I’m wrong on that.
We're going to try out Pearl next year and hope it's more similar to what DRM was. If I offended anyone, I'm genuinely sorry. I just wanted to give my honest opinion because it's been eating away at me ever since we left. If it works for DRM that's awesome and I'm happy for them but it definitely didn't work for us.