Las Islas Canarias - Lanzarote

So last week was Semana Santa also known as Holy Week or the equivalent to spring break in the states, so we had off for a week and a half. We decided to take it easy and head to the Canary Islands for 8 days. We stayed in Lanzarote, said to be one of the most beautiful of the Canaries. The whole chain of islands is more or less off the coast of Africa, is a territory owned by Spain, yet the vast majority of the people there are from England or Ireland. So we had an apartment right on the beach to the Playa del Carmen. The picture of the gate that opens to the ocean, yah thats where we stayed. The beaches were beautiful, but it was impressivly windy almost every day so it made beach-going less fun. The islands are all volcanic as they sit on a fault line, so every hill/mountain you see was at one point a volcano. The pic of me and kelly on the rocks in front of the ocean is what a lot of the shoreline looks like over there. One day we took a guided tour [yes i broke down and took one] to Timanfaya National Park which is this huuuge space lined with volcanoes and covered in volcanic rock. The pic of the red rock cliffs with teh black sand beaches were taken in part of Timanfaya. There was a restaurant at the top of the main volcano that cooked its food with the heat from the earth. We saw some demonstrations of the heat, for example a man took a shovel and dug down about 3 inches into the gravely rock and gave us each a small helping and the rocks were so hot you couldn't even hold them! Then a guy poured water into this pipe that went down into the earth and in about 4 seconds the lava got mad and shot the water back up into the air all geyser style. it was really cool seeing how powerful the earth is! we then rode camels around the volcanoes also very cool. The tour then took us on a wine tasting because Lanzarote's wine was rated the second best in the world. Apparently the island has good soil but its covered in about 4 inches of volcanic rock/ash to protect it from the wind. Each grape plant is planted in its own little hole and then each hole is protected by a 1/2 foot semicircular wall. This as you can imagine makes it very hard to harvest them by machine, so all the grapes are still harvested by hand! After eight days of hanging out at the beach and the pool spiced up with a little volcano climbing and camel riding, i still wasn't ready to come back last thursday but i still had four days of break/semana santa celebrations to see!