Create at both pub & sub. I personally do not like repl as a DR tool, esp merge, as this is slow over a wan link and not scaleable. Also, you are only protected down to tables & data.

I prefer log shipping, you get a perfect copy of entire db, latency is a bit slower however when you failover just bump up your identities to allow for data to be recovered.

If you are sticking with replication, transactional is not a bad idea, here you don't have to add an extra column for every article you want at dr site. Latency and performance is great over a wan. And when you failover, just setup trans pubs to replicate back to your primary site. But again, only tables and data, use red-gate sql compare to keep everything else up to date wheter you use merge or trans.

Good luck ; at least you are setting up somehting remote, most don't even think about...