Chirp - I mean, Woof!

We just returned home from a wonderful weeklong trip to the Canary Islands, a straight 4 hour flight south from London. It's a few small islands off the western coast of Africa, right near the countries of Morocco and Western Sahara.

One would think that these islands would be mobbed by little yellow canaries, but think again. Somehow the Romans stumbled across these bumps a long time ago where they either found a lot of dogs or had a lot of dogs with them (I really can't recall), leading them to them to name this tiny archipeligo after the abundant Canis or Canaris, hence the Canary Islands. I also read recently that Portuguese explorers - Vasco de Gama in particular - used these islands as an easy stopping point on their way down south to go around the horn of Africa. Nowadays, the islands are owned by Spain, so it's an EU country with the Euro, running clean water, paella, and other little niceties.

One of the best things about the Canaries (and our particular destination of the island of Lanzarote) is that there is actually no interesting history or culture to speak of, making the excursion to this sun-dappled destination nothing but a chance to sit by the pool or ocean and relax. Which we did. The kids had a fantastic time and it was all-around one of our best family vacations. We stayed at the Jameos de Playa, a nice resort at the western edge of the town of Puerto del Carmen. Our room was lovely and had a great western-facing view of the ocean. The big pool was perfect for little kids, the buffet food ranged from passable to quite good, and the back door to the resort opened up to a long beachfront promenade of shops and restaurants. There was a small playground and "kids' club" with crafts and toys, and every night at 8pm was a kids' disco, where Sarah shaked her little booty every night (the grump brothers stayed on the sidelines and watched). The only knock on these islands is that they can be very breezy; on a couple days it was windy enough to make pool lounging a bit uncomfortable, but with mini-golf, camel rides and volcanos (post forthcoming), and fully-charged Nintendo DS's, we had no troubles muddling through.