Goodbye, Canary Islands

They´re preparing our stuff upstairs while I´m checking my eMail real quick. Mary sent me an eMail saying Rose and Jun´s luggage was delivered to their house. I´m sure they´ll be pretty relieved once I tell them. Rose has been making several phone calls here and there trying to determine exactly what happened to their luggage and she´s being told different stories everytime she talks with someone.

As I´ve said in my previous blog, I cannot get any Wifi signal for my laptop. To make matters worse, its battery ran out of juice because I cannot charge it here. The hotel does not have an adaptor for its three prong plug. It would have been ok if they did because it´s got a dual voltage power cord. After I downloaded my digital pictures yesterday, it died. I´ll have to charge it back up when we get back to the house in Cadiz. I always get my digital camera fully charged though. And I´ve taken a whole lot of pictures. It´ll be sometime before I´ll be able to post any in my blog however. I haven´t gotten the instructions on how to do it from Eph yet.

Yesterday we hired Abraham, a local taxi driver, to be our tour guide to El Teide in his white Peugeot station wagon. When the hotel booked him for this tour, we were told he speaks poor English. It turned out he speaks no English at all! So Donna has to apply her East LA Spanish and it worked!! Before we parted we told him to pick us up this evening for our trip back to the airport. He´s coming at 7 tonight to drop us off for our 9 pm flight back to Madrid. We´ll get to the Madrid airport at sometime past 1 in the morning and we´ll have to hang out there for several hours. Robert will pick us up, we´ll get recharged at the house for a few hours and then he´ll drop us back off at Jerez tomorrow evening for our trip to Madrid on our way to Rome!

Sistine Chapel and St. Peter´s Basilica, HERE WE COME!!

Tenerife

Robert and I picked Jun and Rose up from the Jerez airport. Their flight arrived on time but since their itinerary got rearranged due to the JFK flight cancellation, they were told their luggage went ahead of them. When they checked at the Jerez counter, they didn´t have their luggage. So we told them to deliver them instead to Tenerife in the morning.

Tenerife is one of the seven islands of the Canary Islands group. Early in the morning Robert took the four of us to the Jerez airport on our way to Madrid, and then on to our final destination, Tenerife. We arrived at Tenerife without a glitch. We took the bus from the airport to our hotel. We´re getting by with Rose and Donna´s abbreviated Spanish. Rose called the airlines to follow up on their luggage and she was told it got shipped from Madrid to Jerez to be delivered to Robert and Mary´s house! So they bought a couple of pieces of clothing and washed their laundry here in the hotel.

We had our first lunch close to our hotel. After we checked in I was going to check whether there´s a Wifi signal when I noticed my laptop was nowhere to be found. I immediately realized forgot it at the restaurant! Jun and I quickly ran back to the restaurant. The moment the waitress saw us, she smiled and said, ¨Si¨ and proceeded to hand me my laptop!

This place is similar to Hawaii, although it´s several degrees cooler here. We´ve been to several sites.

Jardin de Botanico, which is basically a botanical garden where they have trees and plants from practically all over the world.

La Orotava is the oldest city in Tenerife with the typical Spanish architecture, narrow winding roads, and several old churches.

Casas de Balcones are a couple of really old and huge houses that got preserved as museums.

El Teide has been declared a national park. It was originally a volcano and it´s basically the highest peak in Tenerife.

We´ve been having our meals in various restaurants in the area. Just like Rota and Jerez, people have their dinner here late at night and stores close for their mid afternoon siesta.