Saturday morning started with the local tourist Rep coming and giving us the ‘Welcome Meeting’ – I don’t think she was quite prepared for a meeting with an audience of 28 people – all of whom were in one party and knew each other ! Then we wandered off to explore Los Cristianos. We were just over half a mile from the sea, in an area of Hotels, in the town centre by the harbour there are shops and restaurants, and then there are beaches. How much of the beach is genuine and how much is imported sand protected by man made breakwaters I don’t know, I suspect a lot of the latter.

Playa De Las Vistas

We went for a paddle in the sea, the sand was too hot to walk barefoot on the dry parts, there are signs all along the promenade giving temperatures they said things like 31°C all week, which is 88°F. (At night they usually said 22°C, 72°F) It was 1:30ish now, and not having had any breakfast we were getting hungry, and hot, so we headed into the nearest bar for something to eat… Full English Breakfast seemed just the job. 2 Sausages, 2 Rashers of Bacon, 2 Eggs, a Hash Brown, Beans, Tomatoes, Mushrooms and 2 slices of Toast, all for €2.95… including a free half litre of lager. Okay it was only the local brew, Dorado, but it was not much different to San Miguel.

What is it with girls and shopping ? Someone needed to go to a chemist or something so we went into a shopping arcade and the handbag and shoe shop was like a magnet drawing Katherine in… It was about this time that the numbers in our group started to dwindle as people went off to do their own thing, some went back to sunbathe on the beach, Paul and Adam went off to book scuba diving sessions and other people just disappeared ! When Katherine emerged from the bag shop, (with a fake Gucci bag that soon was found to have a dodgy zip) we walked back along the promenade stopping for ice-cream and cocktails before heading back to the hotel… (Okay, the walk back was punctuated by nipping into bars to catch the ongoing football scores, as it was the Man City v Arsenal game live on Satellite, rather amazingly the score ended up 4-1 to the mighty City, much to my satisfaction and Gary’s dismay)

Katherine

In the evening we made a collective decision to go to Playa de las Americas, 28 of us, 7 taxi’s and we’re all there. However 3 decided to stay local and do there own thing and so the rest of us fought for taxi space leaving Paul left on his own… he decided apparently to walk the 3 miles, but met up with the three renegades and stayed with them, though whether they were entirely happy with his intrusion is another matter. The rest of us persuaded a restaurant to rearrange the tables so we had a table of 16 and one of 8 on the promenade overlooking the seashore… a nice place to have a nice meal, except that we were harrassed constantly by Africans (Senegalese and Gambian) trying to sell us fake watches and sunglasses, and Chinese tryng to sell us all sorts of crap. We were joking that we had the whole extended family of Chinese, as we had both male and female age ranging from late teens to pensioners… it got a little irritating after a while because as soon as you had got shut of one of them from one end of the table another arrived at the other end.

After just a day and a half in the sun Vicky had the X-Factor !

After the meal we went round to a bar… the chap outside promised the first of us two drinks for €5 as well as free champagne and shots of (watered down) schnapps. When he realised there were 24 of us he didn’t have enough room and so got the minimarket next door to take their display stands off the street and put more tables out there (I guess the businesses are owned by the same person !)
After a drink or two Katherine decided that she would start acting provocatively with Pete, which surprised his partner Marietta, but she soon joined in Pete thought he was in for a threesome ! and the three of them carried on that way for the rest of the week really.

Pete, with Katherine and Marietta… lucky guy !

Another bar, more drinks, and it was 3.30am. Several people had drifted off back to the Hotel by now and for some strange reason Katherine and Marietta were determined to go into the strip bar, so the two of them Pete and Mark and a couple of others went there leaving Jane, Gary and I to make our way back to the Hotel. I have to feel sorry for Jane here, a taxi back would have only been €2 each, but maybe we were a bit stereotypical – Gary being Jewish and me being a Yorkshireman (definition of a Yorkshireman – a Scotsman with his generosity removed) decided that we would walk the two and a half miles back along the seafront to Los Cristianos and then another 3/4 mile back up to the hotel.

We got in at about 5.00, just a couple of minutes after the others had got back in their taxi from the strip club. Mark apparently had fallen asleep in there, Pete had been dancing with the girls, and one of the others (no names but they know who they are) had spent the €20 for a private lap dance…

Tenerife Holiday – click on a day to find out what happened

Friday 11th
Saturday 12th
Sunday 13th
Monday 14th
Tuesday 15th
Wednesday 16th
Thursday 17th
Friday 18th

It’s strange that I had to leave home at 9.00 to get a flight at 2:45, well I had to drive to Birmingham Airport… in fact I had drive right past Birmingham Airport to go to Coventry where I was leaving my car then get a taxi back to the Airport. I might not have had to set off so early if I hadn’t had to make a couple of stops on the way to go to the Post Office and to grab a geocache, which although it took me down the A38 rather than the A42/M42 I reckon was almost as quick due to the miles and miles of Road Widening works being done on the M1 around Derby and Nottingham.
Check in was quick cos we almost all arrived together and after the interminable waiting we boarded the flight and were off. Flight was quite dull, I even fell asleep which is rare for me on planes, but I guess the book I was reading just wasn’t captivating enough. I could have watched the film which was “The Proposal” but they were charging £3.25 for headphones and I wasn’t really that bothered. Nor did I eat, or drink… Mark and Pete did have 10 cans of beer between them, but they were only small cans and were frightfully expensive.

We arrived at Tenerife just as the sun set, I mean literally just as the sun set, when we started our descent to the runway we were in the sunshine, but as we dropped down the curvature of the earth meant that the sun was below the horizon and it was dusk on the ground. There was a bit of concern at the baggage carousel as ours were the last bags out of the plane, you do get a little worried that your luggage has gone to Moscow when everyone else has got their bags and gone, but eventually mine arrived. Now I was also a little concerned when it did arrive cos I had deliberately left the zips under the strap, but when it got off the carousel the zips were right round at one end… someone had definitely been playing with them, but there was nothing missing when I checked inside.

Having 11 of us on one flight meant a private minibus to take us to Los Cristianos and our hotel, the Aguamar apartments, so we were there within an hour of landing and it was time to grab a quick beer while the rooms were sorted out. It worked out that while some had 3 and 4 to a room, I was in a room with just Mark, not that we looked at the room much, it was just dump the bags, get changed and get back downstairs to go for something to eat, as the flights bringing people from Luton and Gatwick had arrived earlier in the day and these people were hungry and waiting.

The Aguamar Apartments

The view from our room

So there’s 28 of us ambling down the street, the chap hanging around outside the first restaurant we came to did his job well and managed to persuade the hungry and gullible to eat at his Chinese retaurant, 9 or 10 of us however decided to pass on this for the delights of a €6.95 ‘all you can eat’ Chinese Buffet.

After stuffing ourselves silly Adam and I wandered into the town to find a cash machine, and then wandered back up to the restaurant where the others were… this took some time cos we had no idea where we were going we just headed in what we thought was the right  direction and eventually got there, to find that the others had only had their starters and still had main course and dessert to eat… we headed next door to the bar for a drink.

Much (much) later the others finished their meal and joined us, I suppose we weren’t exactly quiet and soon attracted the attention of the local security guard, who was in his mid 50’s, very camp and spoke no English – but he was attracted to the youngest and blondest of the girls in our party, Katherine. This was all okay at first, but every time he passed he was getting talked to and egged on until it got to the stage where he was touching Katherines shoulders and stroking her hair… and that got too much for her and she started shouting at him and it all turned a bit sour.

About 1:30 I decided I’d had enough and with a couple of the others who were still left walked back to the hotel and went to bed. Meanwhile, Mark, Gary and Steve had decided to go to Playa De Las America’s and hit the night life, and Mark arrived back at 4:30 rather worse for wear and telling tales of  Steve losing his camera and spending all his money on the girls in the local strip bar (knocking shop). He had also bought two fake designer watches for a price he wouldn’t have dreamed of spending if he had been sober.

My Roomie – Mark

Tenerife Holiday – click on a day to find out what happened

Friday 11th
Saturday 12th
Sunday 13th
Monday 14th
Tuesday 15th
Wednesday 16th
Thursday 17th
Friday 18th

I started work on the theme for this blog a week ago, I think I have finally got the theme hacked about so I like it and can start putting posts on it rather than spending my time delving into the PHP and CSS editor. It’s not like I know what I’m doing with PHP or much about CSS… I just hack away until it seems to work.

Anyway there are still problems getting the images to work properly, they don’t seem to upload to the right place.
And when I do upload them I am still having a little doubt about whether they are going to display properly in all thumbnail versions, but I will get it working

There is just a little thing that the image doesn’t appear in the post for the ‘default’ category, which was “Blog”, but I’ve turned it to my advantage and made it the Wharfedale Plus category so I can manually insert full size posts rather than the thumbnails the image engine creates for itself… Turn a negative into a positive 🙂

I have a plan, not necessarily a cunning plan, but a plan nonetheless.

To have a website, with 4 or 5 categories, cos I want to record my Family Tree, my Geocaching, I have old friends that I want to remind and embarrass about things we did 20 years ago, I have random musings to record, and I want a blog.

I already had a Domain, and a copy of dreamweaver, but it seemed to me that the easiest way would to be using a CMS like Word Press… so here we are using Word Press, and a theme that lets me keep 5 categories on the front page.

Now all I have to do is learn how to use Word Press… and learn how to adapt this theme to how I want it.