Arrival in Las Palmas

  Las Palmas, Spain
Sunday, November 4, 2007

After a hectic week of packing and house cleaning, we finally left Orleans for Geneva, where we spent a night at the airport. Arriving in Las Palmas yesterday morning, we started shedding off our sweaters and jackets. Summer is back! Today´s temperature peaked at 32 degrees! 
Phillip, our skipper and his friend Max, also from UK, met up with us at the bus station before we shared a taxi to get to the marina. To get to the boat, we got onto a little dinghy boat.We have a cabin to ourselves...there´s 2 cabins in total, rather spacious living room and a little kitchen. There are solar panels all over the place...we´ll be sure not to run out of energy ;-). After settling ourselves, we had a couple of rounds of beer, joined later on by Patrick, a frenchman from Bordeaux and Wolf from Norway.
Eddy, the other crew member, arrived a week ago with his wife, Linda. Eddy is from Israel and works for a company that manufactures vintage boats and Linda works for an ecological park in Ireland. Linda was supposed to come with us, but got pregnant. She´ll be going with us to the south of the island next coming Tuesday and get off from there while the rest of us head towards Cape Verde the next day. We learned from Phillip that Eddy´s a vegan... he´s not too happy with that... cooking´s gonna be quite a challenge to accomodate everybody´s needs.
After our siesta, we decided to have a walk around town.... it was shockingly dead for a Saturday...we found out later that most shops open only from Mon to Fri...Sat and Sun, everyone´s out on the beach.
Prices here are incredibly cheap too... just to give you an idea : petrol prices for almost half of that in France! The island´s tax-free, so electronic goods are cheap...Phillip got his digital camera for 90 EUR! Internet usage is only 1.10 EUR per hour!
For those who´s interested in the name of the boat, it´s Happy Ours SSR 8998 ... dunno if this info will allow u can track our position on the web.