Category: Europe Spring 2020

Our trip to Europe in February, March and April 2020. We visited London, The Canary Islands, the Spanish mainland, France and Italy.

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

It’s a beautiful day here on Gran Canaria, a low of 62 and a high of 70. We started out the day by walking along the promenade to the auditorium at the south end.

Along the promenade

Along the way we stopped for pastries and coffee.

Later we saw a churrería and stopped for more coffee and a churro.

Coffee and a churro

We were resting in our room when we heard the children’s parade starting so we went down to watch.

Part of the children’s parade
More of the children’s parade

Duke was really looking forward to seeing them mark the end of Carnival by burning the sardine. We found some seats in the bleachers and waited for the parade escorting the sardine to start. It was worth the wait. The end of the parade was the sardine followed by mourners in black.

The sardine
The mourners

We followed the sardine as it headed towards the beach. We were swept along by the crowd and were dumped onto the beach. Eventually the sardine was carried down to the water and loaded onto a barge.

The sardine being carried across the beach
The sardine being towed out from the beach

Eventually they lit the sardine on fire and then the magnificent fire works show started.

The sardine burning and the fireworks starting
Fireworks

As the fireworks were ending we found our way to an Italian restaurant overlooking the beach and had dinner. The pizza and ravioli were excellent.

Ristorante Pizzería Al Maccaroni
Anchovy and olive pizza
Shrimp and salmon ravioli

What a great day!

La Palma to Gran Canaria

Saturday we took a plane from the island of La Palma to the island of Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands. It was about a one hour flight. Here’s a link to my La Palma video.

Leaving La Palma

We took the bus into Las Palmas de Gran Canaria where we are staying.

The view from our room

The big Carnival parade on Gran Canaria was Saturday night. Our hotel is right next to the parade route.

We stood in one place for a couple of hours watching the people with beautiful elaborate costumes go by. Then came a series of buses and semi trucks with rolling bars and lots of people on and following each one.

We watched a while, then walked around some, then went up to the restaurant at the top of our hotel to have dinner. The parade started around 6 and when we were eating at 10:30 it was still going on!

Cheese board to share as part of our dinner
The Carnival parade from the restaurant at the top of our hotel

La Gomera to La Palma

We took an 8 pm ferry Thursday night from the island of La Gomera to the Island of La Palma in the Canaries. With so late a departure we had all day to enjoy La Gomera. It was the clearest day we have had since we arrived. We could easily see Tenerife with the Teide Volcano across the channel.

Tenerife and Teide Volcano from La Gomera

We drove to Playa Santiago, the next town along the coast and had coffee overlooking the beach I tested the water and it seemed relatively warm.

Coffee in Playa Santiago
Playa Santiago

We stopped at a viewpoint on our way back to San Sebastián. We could see how the trade wind clouds coming from the north east get stopped by the mountains. The sign at the viewpoint said that it is estimated that the volume of water provided by these clouds is five times what the area gets from rain.

Trade wind clouds are stopped by the mountains.

We knew we would arrive at the Parador on La Palma after the dining room closed. The person at the front desk in La Gomero called La Palma and they said they would give us dinner in our room. We didn’t get to the Parador in La Palma until about 11pm but then we had a great dinner.

Dinner at the Parador in La Palma

Here is a link to the video I made of our time in La Gomera

La Gomera

As you may know I have a YouTube channel. I post trip videos on the channel every few days. I’m going to try to remember to link to my videos here when I post them. I posted my video of Tenerife yesterday.

We arrived on the island of La Gomera in the Canary Islands yesterday. Today we drove around the island. La Gomera is the second smallest of the Canary Islands. Its area is only about 142 square miles. The terrain is rugged with spectacular ravines.

It was interesting to see how the vegetation changed as we drove around the island. on the south side where we are staying it is very dry and desert like. On the north side of the island the vegetation is much greener and denser because of moisture from the trade wind clouds.

We stopped a couple of times to hike in the Garajonay National Park in the center of the island.

We saw this plant on each hike. I thought it should be called a dandelion tree. But I was wrong. It is a Hawk’s Beard Bush!

Hawk’s Beard Bush

We ate dinner at the Parador again.

Watercress soup
Roast goat