The Long and Winding Road

All Lennon and McCartney fans will be humming now. On Tessa, Clive and Chips last day we took a Land Rover out for the day and drove up to mount Teide, the volcano at the heart of Tenerife. It is an amazing ride and with it being such a clear day we had some stunning views. However Land Rovers are not designed for narrow, twisty, turny roads and on the way back down our passengers were not quite as happy as they had been on the way up. How twisty? Well James Bond would love to let his Aston Martin loose on it I'm sure!

Kings Day

In Spain and therefore here in Tenerife one of the main celebrations is Kings Day. This was held on Tuesday 6th and as the name suggests it is when the arrival of the wise men, magi or Kings is celebrated. We went into town (in the rain) after our evening meal and stood patiently at the side of the road for an hour and a half waiting for the procession to start. When it did it was a mix of stilt walkers, jugglers, decorated 'floats' (trucks made to look like sleighs etc) groups of young people with flags and after each group came a King riding on a REAL camel! Once the prosession had gone past we moved to the town square where the Kings met up and re-enacted their meeting with King Herod before taking turns to have photos taken with children. Oh and of course there were some fire works!

2009 Already

Wow 2 weeks since we blogged - sorry !

What have we been doing? Well our friends Tessa, Clive and Christopher (aka Chip) came to stay onboard over Christmas and New Year which was great. They got to see a little bit of what ship life is like and even got to sail as we moved berths (backwards about 800 yards) as shown in the picture.
Christmas onboard is pretty low key compared to being in England, with the focus being very much on Christ and on spending time with friends onboard the ship. We had a service Christmas Eve (just after our Christmas dinner - yum) and then awoke Christmas morning to find lots of sweets and small gifts outside our door from friends onboard.

New Years Eve we had a dance onboard which we all got dressed up for, then a buffet of sweet treats followed at midnight by fireworks courtesy of the dockyard.

Since then it's been back to work for me (Rob) whilst Anne entertains and looks after the children. They go back to school on the 26th Jan so 2 more weeks of wandering around the beautiful parks here first. This shot shows the bamboo walkway near the top of the park.