thanks for your help
Thanks for your input. I love this forum. We ended up staying at the Hotel Playa Palenque which was OK. We would have had to take the road along the beach to check out the "La Playa" area and we were concerned about getting to the border before it closed, so we just went with Route 2. The DR border closes at 7 pm and the Haitian border closes at the same time, but that's 6 pm Haitian time.
There were hardly any people on the beach at Playa Palenque, which was great. We were surprised because it was the Dec. 30th - 31st. We liked the fact that we could take a long walk along the beach there and just take it all in. There were lots of little treasures on the sand, like pieces of coral, interesting pebbles and shells. I like the soft sand there, but it is dark colored. But if you take the long walk down the beach, it's best to have something on your feet, and you have to go through some areas where there is some trash.
No one bothered us to sell us things, or anything like that. Some boys stared at us a little while they were swimming in front of where we were sitting, but they didn't come close. The first day there was competing, very loud music from different restaurants, but on New Years' Eve (day), there was just one source of music and it wasn't too loud.
We didn't realize that the Hotel Playa Palenque is not on the beach, but it's really close--you basically walk across the street and look for a place to walk between buildings. There's a small but nice pool. The rooms have small kitchens with good sized refrigerators, a small table w/ 4 chairs and a terrace with table and chairs too. Our kids' room was great--the air conditioner and fans worked. Unfortunately, we found out late at night that neither worked in our room and we would have like having one or the other. The owners, Pedro and his wife, are nice in general. but when we talked to Pedro about the problems with the room, he didn't want to do anything to make up for it (like free breakfast). He ended up giving us back a little money begrudgingly. Also, there was supposedly hot water, but at night it wasn't hot. The food was good for dinner, and breakfast. And the coffee was excellent. The people who work there were very courteous.
I'll have to report on our other adventures travelling to the north, but I won't do that here since the question was about the south.