Tenerife, LANZAROTE

February half term is usually the time we go to London to visit our Cub, but as he is now living in San Francisco for a while, we took advantage of a Fred. Olsen offer, cuising round the Canary Islands on an All-inclusive deal. Which to most people sounds like a lie down on a variety of beaches. This was NOT the case at all! (But more later...)

The only downside to the deal was we had to fly from Gatwick but it meant we got to stay in the newest, biggest PREMIER INN (at Gatwick Northern Terminal) which had only been open a few weeks.

It smelt amazing! The plush new carpets smelt divine and 630 rooms is a lot of divinely-smelling carpet. Which, incidentally, were all gorgeously purple.... and ....£17 a night? How does Husby FIND these bargains?????

We even managed an hour in the Daily Telegraph hospitality Lounge for a slap-up breakfast before we flew.

REFLECTION OF OUR PLANE IN THE SEA!

Window seat gave us spectacular views of Tenerife and Mt Teide.

REFLECTION OF OUR PLANE ON LAND

Respect to all Air Hostesses out there, how do they DO that job???

I couldn't wait to get off the blummin thing.

We were bussed up to Braemar who was docked at SANTA CRUZ and we managed an hour of sun on deck before dinner with our new friends, Tim and Mary, Gary and Tina who were such good company.

We had time, the following day, to walk up to the big wheel and one of Spain's largest Department Stores EL CORTE INGLES before setting sail for...

ARRECIFE, LANZAROTE.

sparkly twinkly water

I don't know what my doorah's Health and Safety boyf would make of curtains billowing out of open windows on the top floor of a high rise hotel....

...but we were busy finding a beach for lil aliholli to dip in...

...although lil aliholli wandered off round to the far side of the bay to play BOLT with the camera...

HOW SKY BLUE IS THIS BLUE SKY!!!! PUSB

AND THEN I TOOK THE PLUNGE! Literally-I  had to make a run for it as it was the COLDEST sea IMAGINABLE! As you can see no one else was brave enough.

And not an Atlantic roller in sight.

Little did we know half the passengers would be feeling sea sick within hours of this photo being taken.

Arrecife had adult toys...

Formal Night and the Captain's Cocktail Party whoop whoop!

but.....

Well the intention was there... I got changed and wore Linz's necklace, but one sip of the Captain's Welcome Party BucksFizz was enough to send me back to base to ride the waves alone. Husb survived the dinner with our mates but half the restaurant was empty, the sea was so rough that evening. It would definitely have put off a first time cruiser.

While we still had some colour....

We would have liked longer in Lanzarote, a few hours wasn't enough, but we were on our 300 nautical mile way to MADEIRA. Did we really need to go to Madeira???? We could have spent longer in Lanzarote and maybe visited Fuerteventura or Gran Canaria instead. (We DID stock up on wine though!  but that's in the next post....)

That, my friends, turned out to be the only beach/swim that week.