SHORE EXCURSION TO LANZAROTE ISLAND, CANARIES

“Ride a camel” had never appeared on my wish list, but today Jon and I rode a camel! In fact, 150 people from the ship rode camels. It was great, great fun. I’d do it again.

 

Neither had I heard much of anything about the island of Lanzarote of the Canaries,
but now we know quite a bit about it as we spent half a day touring it with a guide who informed about the six years of flowing lava which is longest period in the world and created a landscape that serves as movie location for alien planets! Look at the pictures to see why it qualifies!

The tour of the island was by bus which we shared with other English-speakers. The driver and the guide were from the island, and showed us their skill in negotiating the narrow, curvy roads between the fields of black and black-to-orange basalt that extended for mile after mile. Twently villages were buriedunder the molten lava and other damaged but, as I understand our guide, no person or animal died in the natural disaster. When the farmers returned to their farms, they were “clever”, says our guide, and figured out that they could dig down below the basalt to the soil, plant a plant, build a semi-circular rock wall to keep the sand from burying the plant and it worked! They could return to farming in that way. They made 100,000 plantings like that on the island.

We stopped to shop for a few minutes and noticed that the souvenirs were mostly locally made – jewelry and statuettes of basalt and geodes, sculptures of the lava sand, local ceramics, leather and shells. We have so many cool items in our house in Federal Way that we are not much tempted to buy, but…we did get a couple of neat reminders of the unique place the island is.

We didn’t eat on the island; we came back to the ship. When we lived in Portugal and the Azores, we ate frequently from the sea, so we are trying to take advantage of the fresh seafoods available at the restaurants on board. The chefs do a great job at preparing it. We had whiting for lunch and salmon and sea trout for supper. Nice! Jon found the pool empty enough to swim some good laps.

We were challenged by this thought from our devotional time:

“…our ultimate goal is not to control or fix everything around us; it is to keep communing with God. A successful day is one in which we have stayed in touch with Him, even if many things remain undone at the end of the day. Do not let your to-do list (written or mental) become an idol directing our life. Instead, we ask the Holy Spirit to guide us moment by moment” (paraphrase of Young, p. 13).

Trust that you, too, will be blessed by it.