{"id":710,"date":"2009-11-30T18:13:12","date_gmt":"2009-12-01T00:13:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/?p=710"},"modified":"2009-11-30T18:13:12","modified_gmt":"2009-12-01T00:13:12","slug":"usa-to-spain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/?p=710","title":{"rendered":"USA to Spain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jan and I are just back from a cruise to the Canary Islands, Morocco and Portugal.\u00a0 This is the first of a number of posts about our trip.<\/p>\n

From home (Iowa) we first flew to Chicago, pleasantly at a sane time of day.\u00a0 No problems and enough layover\u00a0 at O’Hare to allow us to have lunch.\u00a0 Our flight to Madrid\u00a0 left on time and there were no problems there either.\u00a0 At Madrid, going through customs was a snap.\u00a0 I wish things were that easy in the US.\u00a0 The only difficulty was a long wait before our next flight to Tenerife.\u00a0 Luckily we were able to spend the time in the comfortable Air Iberia VIP lounge.<\/p>\n

The flight to Tenerife was a little late and the situation was complicated because the gate attendant only made announcements in Spanish.\u00a0 Eventually we got on board and took off.\u00a0 We had a nice lunch\/dinner and the flight was just a couple of hours long.\u00a0 While waiting for our luggage at the Tenerife airport we met some others who were going on the same cruise.<\/p>\n

We were met by a cheerful cab driver who took us to the hotel and we settled in \"HotelBotanico\"<\/a>rather quickly.\u00a0 Had a great meal in the Thai restaurant right in the hotel.\u00a0 We were not leaving for the ship until around noon the next day so we could sleep late and partially make up for our jet-lag.\u00a0 The hotel was the Botanica<\/em>, very nice with fabulous \"BotanicoGrounds\"<\/a>grounds including a small golf course, ponds with koi,\u00a0 statues, fountains and beautiful flowers.<\/p>\n

The process of boarding the ship was much improved over our previous cruises with WindStar<\/a>.\u00a0 Less paperwork and better organized.\u00a0 It also helped that the ship was only half full \"Cabin\"<\/a>(84 passengers of the maximum 148).\u00a0 We settled into our cabin without a lot of trouble and went up \"Click<\/a>pool-side where they had buffet lunch set out for those on board while we waited to sail at 11pm.<\/p>\n

We had dinner that evening with a couple of other passengers, two women from the UK.\u00a0 They were traveling together, leaving \"Rigging\"<\/a>their husbands behind to fend for themselves for the week.\u00a0 After that we went up on deck and waited for the sailing.\u00a0 When they raise the sails they always play the theme from “Chariots of Fire” by Vangelis.\u00a0 At night it is particularly moving as they have the sails lighted and the ship really stands out in the dark.\u00a0 Unfortunately the\u00a0 weather did not cooperate and they did not raise the sails that evening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jan and I are just back from a cruise to the Canary Islands, Morocco and Portugal.\u00a0 This is the first of a number of posts about our trip. From home (Iowa) we first flew to Chicago, pleasantly at a sane time of day.\u00a0 No problems and enough layover\u00a0 at O’Hare to allow us to have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}