Midlist Writer: Travel Tuesday: Exploring the Canary Islands

Wednesday, 8 July 2015

Travel Tuesday: Exploring the Canary Islands

This is a Dragon tree, a native species to the Canaries.

As I mentioned last week, I'm in Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands. My wife is doing some work with the Gran Telescopio Canarias, one of the best ground-based telescopes in the world. she also works with the Hubble Space Telescope. too bad we couldn't get the funding to go into orbit!

While she's doing smart stuff and the kid is in day camp atop a nearby mountain, I'm here in La Laguna writing. Working vacations are the only kind of vacations writers get. The change of venue has done me good, because Madrid is stifling this time of year. Not that Tenerife is much cooler. Being off the coast of Western Sahara it's part of Africa even if it is owned by Spain and filled with Spanish Colonial architecture.

Seventeenth-century private home, now a museum.

Jump the cut for more photos!

Yours truly at another part of the same house.

These prehistoric-looking plants sprout out of walls everywhere.

The sixteenth century Iglesia-Parroquia Matriz de Nuestra Señora de La Concepción (Church of the Immaculate Conception) is visible from my window. The tower made of volcanic rock. Tenerife is basically one giant volcano. It's now extinct, more or less.

Another church in the nearby town of Santa Cruz.

Being an island, of course we visited the beach. That's me in the water, still freezing despite being at 28 degrees latitude. I'm swimming in an artificial lagoon of volcanic rock so the undercurrent doesn't sweep me all the way to the Caribbean.

1 comment:

Alex J. Cavanaugh said...: What a place to visit. Bet it's inspiring. That one church is so unusual looking.; 8 July 2015 at 11:39

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