Imagine dear reader that it is your better half's birthday, you want to make the evening special by going out to a nice restaurant, ideally as it is a warm evening, dining Al Fresco under the stars. In fact you arranged a hotel right in the centre of a large town to make sure of a wide selection of places to go.
You do your research and find a highly recommended restaurant, recommended in two places no less. Of course to be certain you check it out early on, they no longer do food in the evening but recommend somewhere else, it is also closed. You then walk round the whole town, there are many hundreds of people but no restaurants. Eventually you find a touristy restaurant but they seemed to only do plates of cheese, ham or nibbles. You hope the menu undersells their fare, oh no it doesn't; two glasses of wine, a plate of cheese and a plate of ham cost £26. We were still hungry when we left so we asked in our hotel. They directed us to their restaurant which was empty and only did a buffet which has been going since lunch. Reception then suggested two other restaurants up the road, we walked to them – closed. In the end we had room service meals in the bar with a bottle of wine. Not a great to celebrate a birthday.
Admittedly Sunday night in Bishop's Castle is difficult for food but at least we have the Castle Hotel and the Indian, here, a town with probably 100,000 people– nothing, even the Tapas bars were not doing food.
By the end of the evening I was mega grumpy, and being grumpy on an empty stomach is not good. I suspect if I went back to the coast concrete tourist areas I could get fish and chips, a beefburger and a pint of warm beer!
Monday was much better. Jake mentioned in a comment on the blog that we should go north of Santa Cruz, we did today and the hills and coastline were great.
We had lunch at what could have been a nasty tourist restaurant overlooking a great beach but it was the best meal of the holiday so far, my fried octopus was excellent and Gill's fish was good. All restaurants try sell you plates of wrinkled potatoes, no that is not a typo, the word wrinkled is used on all the menus. One plate of wrinkled potatoes is good, two are too many.
They are actually new potatoes which are boiled and then dried so they are not as moist as at home but very nice, just one bowl full is plenty for two people.
This evening we did have very nice tapas in the centre of town washed down with a bottle of the local plonk.
The waitress did not speak English but we ordered every other item on the tapas menu on the assumption all the cheese, fish etc were together, it worked and we had a jolly nice meal.
Before embarking on this epic adventure we researched the ferries between the islands and were somewhat alarmed to find it cost 88€ each as foot passengers from Tenerife to Gran Canaria, a distance of 60 miles. We assumed our research was wrong but today we called in at the ferry port to discover that is the price, madness, so tomorrow we are flying to Grand Canary, it will cost us 100€ each, about twice the cost of the flight of 2000 miles home.
What we do when we arrive we are not sure, we hope it is better than Tenerife which neither of us has warmed to, too many people, very built up, not much charm but perhaps that is just us.