A vacation to remember....or forget?

After Lyle finished working tons of hours in December, I searched for a place where we could leave the unusually cold and snow in Paris. I had a timeshare week expiring at the end of January and figured there must be SOME warm place where we could go to relax and Lyle could de-stress. I thought I found a perfect place.....Tenerife in the Canary Islands. This is about the same distance from Paris as Florida is from Minnesota......just off the western coast of Africa in the Atlantic Ocean. Sunshine and warmth was our goal.

It didn't start out well last Friday morning when we had to call the cab driver at 5:30 a.m. and wake him up. He finally arrived, took a long way to Orly airport, but we got there o.k. and checked one bag through our change of planes in Madrid. A bad idea. After travelling for years on standby, you would think I would know better, especially about bringing change-of-clothes, some toiletries, etc. in your carry-on.....just in case. But we didn't.

We arrived to a snowstorm in Madrid, which we thought was kind of odd. Little did we know that 10 centimeters of snow was one of the heaviest snowstorms in decades there, and enough to close the airport for 5 hours (the first time in 80 years to close because of weather). Of course, we didn't know any of this because Madrid is a "silent airport" and does not announce anything. We should have had a clue when we asked for the bus to take us from one terminal to the other and we received this response: "We have a bus.....but it doesn't work." So, we took a metro and arrived to a crowded terminal with thousands of passengers waiting for flights to take off. We were supposed to leave at noon, kept checking the boards, had a glass of wine with a man from Sweden who reminded me of my Uncle Doug. Airplanes were covered with snow....and there were no plows running.

We later found out that over 500 flights were cancelled, and 55,000 passengers had to stand in snake-like lines throughout the terminal to try and find out information or to re-book. It was chaos, as it seemed everyone was kept in the dark as to what was going on. Lyle looked in the baggage area for our bag, but there were thousands heaped up in piles. I stood in line for a few hours, only to be told to go to another line. By midnight, we noticed the ticket agents leaving, with one person left to handle about a few hundred in front of me. Tired and legs aching, we decided to go to the nearest hotel and come back in the morning.

Lyle had no change-of-clothes.....I had some. After using hotel toothbrushes, we headed back to the still-chaotic airport. I stood in another line for about an hour while Lyle again looked for our missing bag. The bad news was that he couldn't find it or any information about it. The good news.....he talked a ticket agent in the baggage area into getting us a stand-by ticket! His salesmanship and confidence once again come to the rescue.

We were told we were 18th and 19th on the standby list to go out at noon, 24 hours after our scheduled flight. But, we DID get on after another delay of a few hours.....and glad to leave a snow-covered Spain to arrive in Tenerife two hours later.

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But our bag didn't. Another line to report a missing bag, and then off to get our rental car and set out for the resort. But with my poor direction reading, we drove past the resort and up into the mountain before we realized that this couldn't be right. The resort was on the beach. Now, the sun had set and we drove a harrowing ride down the mountain in the dark through banana fields, a few wrong turns back and forth, but finally made it to a room with a beautiful view overlooking the Atlantic by 7 p.m. on Saturday night.

The island of Tenerife is one of seven volcanic islands and it reminded me somewhat of Kauai, Hawaii, although a lot more drier. We were on the southwest side, which was very dry and looked like Arizona. It is a part of Spain, and a destination spot for northern Europeans, especially the Brits and Germans. Being Americans, we were an oddity.

We spent Sunday driving around the island to sight-see. The north coast, about two hours away, is cooler and more lush, with quaint seacoast towns full of history.

We didn't take the time to explore, though, because we wanted to see the snow-covered mountain in the middle of the island, Mt. Teide. This is a dormant volcano 3,718 meters high, which even has a ski-lift going to the top! It is also in the middle of a national park full of pine forests at over 7,000 feet, and huge craters. It was the oddest landscape we had ever seen.

With still no bag on Monday, we took a trip back to the airport to ask more questions. Getting nowhere, we figured we finally had to make a shopping trip to get some clothes. Neither of us had shorts and had been wearing the same jeans for three days. In our new duds, we relaxed that evening, had wonderful fresh seafood at a seaside restaurant, and took in the resort's entertainment of local singers and karaoke. (I managed to win a bottle of wine playing Bingo!)

The weather got increasingly warmer and sunnier.....and so we were ecstatic to finally get our bag on Tuesday morning! Where it had been for four days, only the bag could tell. The tags looked like it had gone to the airport on the north side of the island, but we have no idea when. We had one whole day left and spent the afternoon golfing, one of the main goals of our little vacation.

We were scheduled to leave at 2:50 pm on Wednesday (this is significant.....check the next post), so we tried to see if we could change flights. After all, the airline goofed up.....we lost a few days of our well-planned vacation. But, flights remained full, so we soaked up the gorgeous sunset on our last night.....

But the saga doesn't end there.....check out the next blog for our continuing frustrations......