Gran Canaria Day 1

Canaries Blog 1

Whistled down US 87 to very snowy Newark to spend Friday night and most of Saturday with Stefan and family. Stopped briefly near Stef’s to stuff the car into one of the ubiquitous 6’ snowbanks and enjoy a lovely Thai supper. Stefan seriously considering buying a snowblower. The grandsons all appear to have grown a foot since Christmas.

Then on Saturday, Stef chauffeured us to Newark International where we endured the usual grim security and boarded our Continental redeye flight at 8:30 PM Saturday for Madrid. They were late leaving and then had to undergo de-icing before being released. Continental and United have joined forces so the skies are now full of flying sardine cans. Six hours and a bunch of time zones later, we unloaded late at Madrid. All was confusion at the gate and by the time we walked the miles to our connecting flight and cleared customs, it had left. Spanair, the Partner airline was very good, found our bags and a lovely, dark-haired senorita got us on the next flight to Las Palmas.

The plane, an Airbus 320 was quite spacious and sported seats by Recaro of sportscar seat fame. I was interested to see that the middle seats in the three-seat rows were three inches wider than the end seats and roomy enough even for bulky, balding Canucks. Legroom was much improved over Continental. Anyway, three more hours got us to Gran Canary where we had of course missed the hotel shuttle. A happy taxi driver took us to the hotel for 40E where we arrived finally at 5PM Sunday and checked into our apartment-hotel Las Folias San Agustin in a light 18 degree C rain, thoroughly exhausted.

After a refreshing beverage, we ventured downstairs to discover the terrace restaurant had closed their roof, fired up the patio heaters and was serving a delightful, steaming hot Paella (with a side order of Sangre de Toro). Suddenly hungry, we tucked in, shared a banana split dessert and a complimentary local honey-rum digestif (all for 40E, tip included) and weaved back to our room for a post-prandial Spanish cigar on the deck (after carefully making reservations for tomorrow night’s Spanish BBQ party).

Aaah!