When Cole first moved over and I was still in the States, he called me from work and said there was a sale for flights to the Canary Islands. At the time, I embarrassingly didn’t even know where the Canary Islands were  but it sounded exotic and told him to book them (p.s. for anyone who doesn’t know like me – the Canary Islands are off the coast of Africa but actually part of Spain). He booked us a flight for January as he figured we would be needing an escape from the dreary Dutch winter around that time. He was definitely right and we were both looking forward to a sunny holiday for a few days.

We visited the largest island, Gran canaria, and rented a car so we could explore the island during our trip. Our hotel was on the southern end in a resort area called Maspalomas.

We checked into our hotel (and had a big unpleasant surprise that for some reason they charged you per person) so the cost of the hotel basically doubled. While it didn’t make any sense since we weren’t opting into the all inclusive, they were so rude that we decided we would sort it out later. Bottom line, while the Lopesan hotel was beautiful, the service was pretty awful and we definitely felt like it should have been clear upon booking the hidden charges.

That evening we walked along the promenade along the beach that goes into the nearby town and grabbed a quick bite to eat.

The rest of the weekend consisted of a lot of pool time along with one day spent exploring the mountains in the center of the island, which was absolutely breathtaking. I found a hike I thought we would enjoy and directed the GPS towards the address. When the GPS informed us that we had “arrived” in the middle of nowhere, up some steep street, with no parking in sight. We decided to find a spot we could pull over and wander around ourselves. After parking in basically someone’s driveway, we began our “hike”, where we ran into an adorable puppy we affectionately named Churro. We explored for about an hour before worrying that whoever driveway we parked in would either tow our car or steal it and decided to head back. We then drove around to a few lookouts and Roque Nublo. Finally, we headed back to our hotel down the windy roads that afforded us with an incredible view of the island.

The craziest drive up to our hike

Churro!

It was really nice to have a sunny escape for a few days in the middle of a long winter in Amsterdam and the gran Canary Islands were beautiful! We’ve heard amazing things about Tenerife so maybe we will visit there sometime in the future!

Till our next adventure…

xoxo