Saturday, July 30, 2011

Lounging in Lanzarote

Part of the reason we chose Lanzarote for our vacation was because we could use our time share week at one of their resorts, Club del Carmen. A few years ago, we bought a time share week on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. We can use this week in Kauai or we can trade it for lots of other locations around the globe, and since Hawaii is a ridiculously long trip for us right now, we opted to trade. The nice thing about owning in Hawaii is that it's considered a "platinum" location so it's easy to trade - the not so nice thing is that we rarely get an equivalent trade on our end, which was definitely the case with Club del Carmen. Don't get me wrong, for Lanzarote, Club del Carmen is probably one of the nicest resorts on the island, but let's just say it ain't no Hawaii.

We had a one bedroom unit with a kitchen, living area and nice balcony overlooking the pool. It was small, but fine for our needs. Our only complaint was that you had to pay for everything - wifi, water, pool towels! Oh, that and the mosquitos. Here are a few pics of the place.

I got a kick out of watching the other guests vie for sun chairs at the pool each day. When we arrived, we got a notice saying is was forbidden to reserve sun chairs with your towels around the pool and that towels left unattended for an hour, would be removed. So, each morning around 9am, I'd watch the pool migration - one member of the family would head out with everyone's towel, get their set of chairs organized and situated (oh, yeah, you had to get your own chair from a stack in the corner and set it up yourself) and then settle in to wait for the rest of the crew to arrive. It was funny to see groups stake their claim each morning - some people literally spent their entire week in the same place by the pool - they'd arrive at 9am and pack up around 6 or 6:30pm EVERY DAY. And the resort was only a 3 minute walk to the beach. Luckily, neither Brian nor I are "sit by the pool all day" kind of folks, so we didn't run into any issues.

Our lounging preference was to find a nice spot overlooking the water, have a drink or two and bring our books along. On our second day, we stumbled upon the perfect lounge spot along the top of Grand Playa (beach) in downtown Lanzarote. From this spot, we got a great view of the beach (and the fun little toys you could rent), could order drinks and food, had enough shade to stay cool and not get sunburned, and had comfy lounge chairs perfect for reading.




When we got tired of this spot, we could head to a nearby town called Costa Teguise and there was another cafe overlooking one of the beaches. This place didn't have the comfy chairs, but did have a nice bar, shade and a great view.


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