Tenerife Day 1

Our flight today was at 6:40am from Edinburgh airport so we had to get up at just after 4am. After getting a taxi to airport, our Ryanair flight took off pretty much on time. We had taken sandwiches to eat on the plane.

We landed on time at 11:10, but there was a huge queue for hire car at Goldcar. It's obviously the cheapest company as none of the other desks had queues. It took over an hour to get to the front.

Finally we got the keys to our car, a red Toyota Yaris, which was perfectly fine all week. We drove to the town of Palm Mar which was only 15 minutes away and easy to find, even though not very well signposted from the motorway.

We met the owner of the apartment, Renato Sandrini, who let us in and showed us around. It had everything we needed and was very clean, though the decor was maybe a little seventies. The complex had a swimming pool, which didn't seem to be used very much.

After a long journey we had a snooze, then went for a walk around town. Palm Mar isn't exactly very picturesque, but it is in the warm south of the island and not in the busiest hot spots of Los Christianos and Playa de las Americas. It's very obvious here, as in most of Spain, that mass building of apartment blocks came to a sudden halt in the recession a few years back and there are loads of unfinished developments.

We had a drink in a local bar - it was very cheap, over the course of the week we saw loads of bars trying to attract tourists with beer for 1 or 1.5 euros for a half litre. We then went to the supermarket for some provisions.

We were still quite tired so decided to stay in and cook. We had pasta and sauce and garlic bread, and went to bed early.