Tenerife, Spain: It's not all sun in the Canary Islands...

For Thanksgiving/My Birthday we booked a trip to Tenerife, Spain! Tenerife is the largest and most populous of the seven Canary Islands and is located only 186 miles off the coast of western Africa.  We were most excited to be headed somewhere warm to just relax for 5 days after our other recent trips being so busy sightseeing and on the go... But let's be honest we were hoping to soak up at least a LITTLE sun and enjoy some warmth being that it gets dark around 3:45pm in the UK right now! Unfortunately that isn't quite what was in store for us...  The dates of this trip were Nov 28th- Dec 2nd.  We left early in the morning on Thanksgiving day and the flight was about 4 hours to get there. Traveling on Thanksgiving made our first holiday away from home a bit easier, although we still didn't get to have any turkey! 

Once we arrived in Tenerife and got to our resort we quickly changed into shorts and short sleeves/tank tops and went to explore a bit in front of our place.  We immediately thought it looked very similar to Hawaii with all the lava rocks in front from volcanos that erupted and formed the island millions of years ago.  As you can see from the pics it was partly sunny and the temps felt great (around 72 degrees) little did we know this was the most sun we would see during our 5 days.  

                 

A beautiful Spanish Sunset for our first night! 

    Our lovely resort

We celebrated the morning of my "Golden Birthday" turning 29 on the 29th with a HUGE crepe from a cafe next to our resort. We ended up going there 4 times during our stay for various breakfasts and lunches... think we each had 3 of these before we left! They were just too good! 

As you can see from the picture it was cloudy... However the sun did manage to pop out for about an hour or so and it sure felt nice when it did.  We spent most of the day lounging around and relaxing.  Once happy hour rolled around we found ourselves near the pool bar for 2 for 1's!  We met a Scottish couple that was talking to another American family who are currently living in Germany.  It was pretty funny because they found out it was my birthday so decided to sing to me... just before they got to the part where they would say my name the one guy was motioning to me what my name is since we hadn't even exchanged names yet! Then the Scottish couple gave us a recommendation of nice French restaurant to go to for dinner.  We were able to get in and it was fabulous! There was a British couple beside us who ended up helping us read the menu since the entire special board was in Spanish.  Here is a picture of the yummy chocolate birthday dessert! Only one more year until 30... YIKES!

Saturday morning we decided to take out our rental car (never got a pic of it but it sure made some interesting noises, it was old and sounded like a spaceship) for a drive up the center of the island to Mount Tiede which is an old volcano and the highest point in Spain.  On our way through some of the small villages we kept seeing police cars and policemen standing around and along the roads.  We were starting to wonder if we should be concerned but just kept continuing on our steep drive with the road winding back and forth.  Eventually we got to a point (45mins in) where all the cars were backing up and officers were talking to each car.  We then started to wonder if they were searching for someone or something... Turns out they were closing the road due to a bike race that was going to be happening! Funny that they didn't post signs or anything and crazy to think people were actually going to bike on that road! So we had to turn around and never made it up the mountain to the park that was at the top.  We did see some nice views though on the way up and down.  No pictures though.. I was about to be car sick by the time we made it back down.  

The next few days continued to be cloudy, cloudy and more clouds... with a sprinkle of showers here and there.  Just bad luck really... We talked to the Scottish couple again who said they had been going there for 20 years and they said they never seen it so cloudy!  We hardly took any pics on this trip, on our last morning realized we didn't even have any of Brian yet, here is one...  

Our flight wasn't until late Monday night so we had all day to hangout but it turned out to be a full out rainy/thunderstorming day. Nobody at the pool...

Here is how we spent it... 

Even though it wasn't the sunny vacation we had envisioned we still were able to relax, read books and rest! We may give the Canary Islands another try sometime... still determined to find sun there!