Deciding on a change of venue for our morning coffee, we took a walk to the Barlovento 326 café, then walked along the east wall of the waterfront afterwards, passing the anchorage outside the marina and choosing a few rocks as options for our upcoming rock-painting event. On our return, we stopped by the ARC office and scheduled our Safety Check.
Back onboard we prepared for the Safety Check, which was completed late afternoon and, thankfully, no issues were uncovered; we were bonafide, thankful that we didn’t have to make yet another trip to a chandlery.
Our day ended with disconcerting news of a yacht having sunk two days ago en route to the Canary Islands from Gibraltar, obviously getting caught up in the awful weather conditions associated with Storm Ciaran, which is still wreaking havoc on mainland Europe. Definitely not the kind of news any cruiser wants to hear, especially before an ocean crossing.
Today was our grandsons, Brayden and Carter’s 7th birthday, but before we “celebrated with them”, we enjoyed a long walk to the mall on Gran Canaria, CC Las Arenas, passing the rather odd looking Alfredo Kraus Auditorium for the Arts and the huge Christmas Tree being erected at the mall.
It’s fair to say Elaine was definitely surprised to find a lovely modern, clean mall with numerous brand named shops and, in particular, the large Carrefour supermarket we wanted to visit. Before browsing the supermarket, though, we stopped for a coffee at Cafés de Carla and what we thought would be a baked delight, the latter not very tasty at all, forcing Elaine to leave her choice of apple cake uneaten. It was, however, novel to have our coffees served by a little robot, bringing back fond memories of Singapore. Unfortunately, however, unlike Singapore, this was a classic example of an inefficient automated service, where our baked “delights” arrived fifteen minutes after our coffee.
Setting that aside, we then enjoyed a stroll around the Carrefour, settling on freshly made sushi for lunch, enjoyed back onboard after our taxi ride back to the marina.
After lunch it was time to enjoy the “birthday celebrations” with the twins. After singing Happy Birthday to them, much to their delight, we were shown their presents and heard all about what they had built, before the candles were lit on the birthday cake and a second round of Happy Birthday was sung, this time with mom, dad and big brother, William, present. After a brief chat to William, who was engrossed in the Lego truck he was building, it was almost time for the grandchildren to head off to school, but not before we heard all about their Halloween costumes and the Trick or Treat they enjoyed with friends.
By late afternoon it was time to fetch the additional diesel jerry cans we had ordered and had these filled. Thankfully another cruising couple on our dock had hired a car and happened to be at the same fuel station where we were filling up our new jerry cans, generously offering to take ours jerry cans back to the dock for us, thus savings us a very long shlep, for which we were most grateful.
Our day ended with a lovely long chat to Keenan, who had time on his hands, after dropping the grandsons at school and Brooke at the airport for her weekend getaway to visit friends.
