For the love of life: La Palma

Wake this morning after a refreshing sleep. But poor Andy hasn't slept so well. He feels like he has a mouth ulcer and is trying not to worry that it could be an abscess.

We see Santa Cruz de La Palma first thing this morning through our cabin window. It looks beautiful, a small volcanic island with beautiful brightly coloured buildings nestled inbetween its mountains. I'm half expecting to see some dinosaurs appearing.

We get up to the sun deck early for breakfast and the sun is coming out. It's so wonderful to be eating breakfast outside on a ship and arriving at a beautiful location.

Fruity breakfast anyone?

We dock at Santa Cruz de La Palma and walk to the shops. Already you can feel the beautiful heat and the temp is around 20C. So good to feel after the UK cold.

Easy to walk from the ship to the town

We find a coffee shop pretty quickly. My main obsession is to get as much sun as possible so I get Andy to move a table away from the shaded umbrellas and out into the sun. This makes me laugh because Andy is worried we will get into trouble with the cafe owner. All is okay though and we sit there for awhile.

I'm happy to just heat up in the sun and write postcards. So Andy wanders off to check out the shops. He's back pretty quick to tell me there's a jewellers I'll be able to get into. We see some pretty jewellery, including a lizard ring and necklace which Andy buys me ...... soooo lovely!

Andy takes some lovely pictures. The architecture and colours are stunning.

At the heart of Santa Cruz runs the narrow pedestrianized Calle O'Daly, which was named after a banana merchant. The street is lined with historic houses on both sides.

Plaza Espana, a pretty square bordered by the 16th century town hall and the pleasing Renaissance architecture of the inglesia del Salvador.

Locals having a chit chat

Lovely to see the mountain view through the street.

We buy a scratch card from a street vendor. Andy tries a bit of pigeon English in the hope that if he speaks English in a Spanish accent, she'll understand him. She doesn't. We haven't a clue whether we've won on our scratchcard so we take it back to her and she tries to explain we haven't scratched off everything yet. That takes awhile and she looks quite exasperated with our complete ignorance. Then we realise, finally! We hand it back to her, she puts it in her special machine to check whether it's a winner. I tell Andy to keep hold of the ticket even if she tells us we haven't won, she might just be pretending. She might do a runner with our winning ticket. But no, we see the result on the machine, it's not a win for us this time. "Sigh".

Back for another coffee, this time in the shade.

Love seeing palm trees

We return to the ship around 2pm Andy has a swim in the whirlpool and I sunbathe on deck 14. Everywhere on the deck there are people sunbathing on the sun loungers.

As we didn't eat lunch in La Palma, we decide to eat some tasty potato wedges, a thai wrap, salad and a couple of chocolate cakes. Yummmy. Clothes are getting tighter!

Back to the cabin to refresh ourselves. Before we know it it's time for dinner.

La Palma through the window

Tonight my choice is mushroom pate on oatcakes for starter. And then the most delicious halloumi and flatbreads with roasted peppers. And dessert is Greek yoghurt cheesecake with spiced blueberries. It is heaven!