One of us is on deck for a milestone birthday, so, we decided on a little trip abroad to celebrate!
Ok, it’s me, the author, and the birthday has already happened. I’m just getting around to making a post, for anyone who is interested.
i won’t bore with all the travel details, but, instead, give the “highlights”!
(There haven’t been many so far, just warning you)
We arrived in Barcelona, and spent a nice day there. We’ve been there before, so we were a little bit familiar with the Metro, and we wandered around the typical Barca attractions.
We stayed at a less than interesting hotel, EasyFire Barcelona. Wouldn’t go there again. A little too spartan, have to ask for extra towels, etc. etc. The Restaurant close by was very good, and we would recommend that, no problem.
We opted to fly from Barcelona to Santa Cruz de la Palma, via Iberia. We assumed it might be a better experience than flying with Ryan air. Well, in life you can’t live two parallel tracks, but maybe Ryan Air might have been better for us. Both flights getting to La Palma were delayed, [Barcelona – Madrid-Santa Cruz] and then our luggage got lost. It stayed in Madrid, when we flew onwards. Frustrating, for sure. The reason we knew we were in trouble? We bought Apple AirTags! We could see that our luggage was no where near us!
So, that got resolved the next day, but that day ends of being a write off as we didn’t want to venture far, in case the luggage was arriving.
Frustration continues, it seems that all of the Canary Islands are experiencing a very long heat wave. The temps have been in the low 30s celcius, and the nighttime lows are not much different. It’s been really hard to get rest. Laying awake for hours, with the heat, or crazy hot winds, is really exhausting. Jet lag, heat, and no respite from the heat has been a challenge.
Our Air bnb hosts have been accommodating, we asked for a bit of help and they got a small portable air conditioning unit. Night one was really a relief, night two less so. Slowly working out how to make it most effective.
Our main reason for coming here, in the fall, is to do lots of walks and hikes. This is the third time we’ve been here, and are familiar enough with what we can do. Did I mention that the air quality here is pretty horrible? Yep, that too. We think this is winds off of Africa, but we don’t know for sure. Another… did I mention that Lars has been under the weather too? He has been fighting a cold, and feels pretty crappy….
Being limited seemingly every which way we face, we were able to try a short hike quite high up (altitude wise) on the island. Refugio El Pilar, is at approximately 1400 meters – and there was quite a nice breeze as the trails we were trying were on the spine of the island. The altitude and winds from the east side of the island gave us some relief!
So, my birthday was last week, and we haven’t quite had the opportunity to get out and have a nice meal. This heat wave it expected to last another week, so two out of the three that we’ll be here will be under heat.
So, while things are a bit of a stinker, we are still hopeful. We’ll try some hikes at Refugio El Pilar and do other touristy stuff until the heat breaks. We’ve booked in at another place on La Palma for a few nights, then we’ll make our way to Gran Canaria. We’ll stay at a fairly remote cottage at the Central part of the island, then finish off with a few nights in Las Palmas. Then, fly to Paris and make our way back. So, that’s the general overview of the trip, that’s just over one week in. I’m hoping the next post about this trip will be excellent, in a good way! Stay tuned!
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