Back to T-shirts & shorts

We have spent 2 weeks in Marina Lanzarote in Arrecife which is the capital of Lanzarote where finally it's back to T-shirts and shorts! 😎 For the first couple of days we rested up and tried to regain our normal sleep pattern. We just potted around cleaning the boat up and did not really venture too far from the marina. Which I can say has to be one of the nicer marinas we have stayed at, the staff are ever so helpful and friendly. The only grumble we would have is that the bus station is a half hour walk away which is more of an inconvenience when you have time keeping as excellent as we do 😂. A little bit of background info here, Nigel and I came to Lanzarote 10 years ago, plus Nigel used to visit the island nearly every year for years before we got together so he knows it very well. With this in mind we decided that we did not need to do all the tourist trips (as rock really doesn't change 😄) We decided that we would just visit Puerto del Carmen, César Manrique's house and Tegise market. After a couple of days we decided to have a cycle upto Ikea (yes very touristy we know) however, on the way we went past Castillo San Jose, we decided to stop and have a look around, the castle was quite well kept and housed a sculpture and modern art exhibition. Modern art really does not do it for either Nigel or I and still astounds us both that works that look like they have been done by toddlers can be exhibited! The sculptures where kind of eerie too as they were predominantly of clothed modern day people just standing around. I really did wonder if there was one of those live statue's waiting to jump out at us or if they came alive at night. Luckily we never saw any walking around the marina at night! On our way back we took a different route and came across a Canarian man who was making little boats out of Steel drums. Which are used by the local kids, they even have an annual competition which looked like great fun from the pictures he showed us. He demonstrated by making a little keyring sized version while we were there which was sweet. We put a few coins in his donation box and he offered us one of the little boats he was quite surprised that I wanted the one he had just made but he understood (in my best charades) that I wanted the one we saw him make. Just as we were leaving he shouted over and gave me one of his completed ones which he had decorated with a flower. So you see even a trip to Ikea can be a mini cultural adventure 😆 We decided that we would visit Puerto del Carmen on an evening instead of during the day and treat ourselves. When we arrived we were a little peckish and as it was still a little too early for a meal we decided a beer and tapas would be a great way to start our evening. We found a place in th he old town which looked ok. But later we were to discover it was not as we had been food poisoned! 😭 Anyway back to Puerto del Carmen, we looked around the place and where quite shocked to find how much it had changed, it literally has become one very touristy awful places one tries to avoid! In all the trip was very expensive and did quite ruin some fond memories particularly for Nigel. So with this in mind we decided not to visit the César Manrique's house as we did not want to find that they had changed things there or that the 2nd time round lost the impressive wow factor of the first vist. In the marina we were berthed next to S/V Magic Dragon that had a lovely young family onboard. Sam & Lee were quite helpful in pointing us in the right direction for certain things and you would hardly know they had 3 young children onboard they were so well behaved. One day we were just chatting about music and it turned out there oldest son Sal wanted to play drums but his rhythm was lacking so Nigel offered to give Sal a lesson on the Cahon, which he appeared to enjoy and of course Nigel enjoys being able to help out in this way where ever he can 🎶 We caught up with our musical friends Mice in a Match box (aka) Sally & Jim from S/V Chaos They also sailed down from the Portuguese coast at a simaller time to us, which was great as we were able to compare notes of our trip and have a good old catch up. We spent one night where Nigel had a bit of a jam with them on his cahon which was good fun, 'with' maybe a little too much gin added into the equation 😈 later that evening there was a paid for Queen tribute band playing in the marina, one thing was for sure we could more than hear it from our boat and we could even see the stage (which was a little unfortunate as the tight white lycra suit on a middle aged/getting on a bit man! was not a pretty sight) but other than that it was an enjoyable evening. The morning after we headed off for Teguise market, the mice decided to give it a miss, but we decided we were still going anyway. After catching the bus there we spent a few leisurely hours strolling around and doing a little Christmas shopping. We thought the market did not seem as busy as it once had been with less stalls although still is quite sizeable. Over the 2 weeks here we have also been playing with our boat gremlins again finding and fixing leaks, Nigel had to go to the top of the mast (his least favourite place) to re thread the halyard through the block, that had broke on the way down here. With these imedeate jobs completed, we have decided it's time to move on and go meet our Norwegian Viking friends off S/V Cassie so tomorrow we leave for Las Palmas Gran Canaria 😀

#Lanzarote #Marinalife #2015