Oct 21-27
So I’m writing this in retrospect. These days were a bit of a blur. I was trying to get things settled and or fixed and trying to learn how to get from here to there and also trying to get off the ship as often as possible to see things.
Madeira, Portugal was our first stop and it was pretty fantastic. We started in Southampton, England where the weather is about like Seattle in the fall. Grey, drizzly and cool, bordering on chilly. Madeira is a small island owned by Portugal and it was sunny and warm and had dazzling flowers and lizards that were sunning themselves on the walls. It was amazing. Here and in many of the places since, many of the sidewalks were “tiled” with white and black rocks arranged to make decorative patterns. Which are beautiful and probably last forever.
I think my favorite part of this island was how quickly you felt that you’d found local places when you’d turn off the main tourist drag. Wherever a cruise ship docks, you will find people catering to the ship guests and generally whatever it is, it holds very little interest for me. So I took a left turn off the strip as soon as I could and within a block the pace of life seemed to come to a crawl. People were drinking drinks at an outdoor café next to a plaza of an old building and adjacent was an incredible, shady park with water features and locals playing soccer with their friends and so I hung out in this area for the hour or so that I had off the ship that day.
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| Love the graffiti and the stonework. |
Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain
Tenerife, like Madeira before it is built between the mountains and the sea, with the town starting at the water and pushing its way up the hill. This town was a bit bigger, with a light rail system and just the feel of a bigger city. It had a beautiful plaza near the water and many shops around, but still had lots of narrow roads to wander around and explore. I was very impressed by all the public art here. Particularly some rather large scale bronze sculptures. It just seemed that there was a lot of respect and value of handmade accents on buildings and the feel that you wouldn’t have to look far to find some one of a kind object.
Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain
Gran Canaria had the beach town feel. There was a mall right by the dock where I and the guys I was hanging out with that day went bowling. That’s right. I’ve bowled on a tropical Spanish island.
Beyond the mall there is a downtown with lots of beach and tourist oriented stores as well as shopping for locals. It is a reasonable sized city, but once you walk through about 5 blocks of buildings you’re on the real beach which stretches for a couple miles. We walked down the boardwalk and then I walked back up the beach by myself. When I retraced my steps back toward the dock I started to second guess myself. I had plenty of time, but when I came out to where I could see the ship I wasn’t exactly where I thought I was going to be and it took a bit longer to get back than I was planning, but I’ve been giving myself at least an hour of buffer time to learn about these sorts of things.
Lanzarote, Canary Islands, Spain
This is the only port I didn’t get off the ship at. I had a couple trainings this day. There are lots of trainings when you start life on a ship. They were about daily up to this point. Lanzarote was pretty industrial looking right around the ship, but there were a few volcanoes on the horizon that looked like they might be fun to explore, but alas, no time.
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