Lanzarote

In September 2003 Sues parents were off to Lanzarote for their 18th annual visit, they have a timeshare at Las Casitas, Playa Blanca, so we decided to sneak in and just turn up for the middle week. It was our 20th wedding aninversary so we wanted a vacation too. Keeping it secret was a laugh, everyone else in the family knew, but Sues parents didn't. We had it all set up, "keep your phone on" we told them .. this was so we could find them when we turned up. We flew out on Sunday afternoon from Gatwick, getting in to Arrecife around 7pm. We had booked a car for the week, 4 * 4 with AC, having been to Lanzarote before (this was our 4th trip) and knew what the roads where like - we had selected a 4 * 4 to try off roading, and with the temp was nice average 31C AC was an essential. On grabbing the car we set off and headed to the timeshare to find ... NO PARENTS and to make matters worse no phone on... Parents never listen to children do they ;-) Having had a long journey what was better than to wait relaxing by the pool bar with a G&T. Still no sound of them, although Sue was getting on first name terms with the woman from the Orange Answer phone service. After the G&T picked up a bottle of wine and some cups and headed off to camp out on their verandah.

Eventually they wandered back to the bungalow to find us sat on the patio drinking the red wine from paper cups.. they got a (nice) shock. We had been thinking of excuses for ages for why we were there - needed to play with new toy (GPS with "made up maps"), needed somewhere different to go for our 20th anniversary meal, or just no where to go on Sunday. Then we were provided with the best one - mum rang to say please send out swimsuits : she had been hoping to buy some new ones out there but couldn't find any she liked. So the excuse was we had to take them out to ensure they got there before mum and dad had to return home. Not bad considering we had booked in April for the surprise in September.

Contrary to the parents plan for a quiet 3 week holiday around Playa Blanca our plan was to have a week of exploration, as we are not ones for sitting by the pool in the sun for hour after hour anymore. Mum and dad opted to join us. We had been preparing for weeks, loads of maps and research had given us a list opf places to go and see, we had a Garmin GPS V with us so had approximate waypoints for loads of places. As we went thru the week we added in accurate waypoints for all the places and have built up a waypoint list for Lanzarote.

This section provides a write up of the holiday - Diary, the waypoints and details of the sights. A selection of the photos can be found in the gallery. The write ups have been somewhat arbitrarily divided into three -

Southern

Central

Northern