Our Trip To Puerto De La Cruz

This last weekend we went up to Puerto de la Cruz again to spend our day off there.

Like many times before we slept at a hotel over night.

Saturday night we had our dinner at restaurante Regulo, which is our favourite.

Me waiting for the dinner. 

 I had fillet steak filled with Chamembert cheese in pepper sauce.

A plate I recommend you to try if you will pay a visit.

It was so lovely taste and so tender and nice that I think I had a smile upon my 

face all the time while I was eating. 

 This restaurant is a good one. They have got many diplomas and even a recommendation of Michelin! So don´t miss it out if you visit Puerto de la Cruz!!!

 After the meal we went to Plaza Charco for a drink and sat there and watched the Canarians dancing.

3 hours just disappeared when it was so much going on .We saw everything from professional dancers to real Cassanovas and we had so fun watching them, what they all were up to. He,he! It was like a good show!

Next morning we had breakfast at the hotel and then about 11am we started our

journey down to Los Cristianos. It was raining and heavy thunderstorm!

The more close we got to Sta Cruz the worse the weather turned.

 We had to watch the road carefully because every now and then the lids of the street wells just popped up and it came like a water fountain out from them. Really scary! 

The weather turned worse and worse and we finally almost could not see the street.

And the sky was filled with lightnings and thunders.

We started saying that we will probably not get down to Los Cristianos and since we have seen a lot of photos from the heavy rains last year we understood how dangerous this is.

 The rain water was flushing down the mountain walls and finally arrived at the streets where we were driving. We had to take an other trip to get to the motorway that goes down to south. The tunnel before Alcampo was filled with water and many cars were trapped inside there. Good that we saw it in the last second or we would have been there too. And good that Brito knows Sta Cruz (he lived there for about 10 years before). He knew how we could drive to avoid the worse places and all the tunnels and he made 2 choices, that we know, that with wrong decision would have caused our car to drown in the water masses. When we looked down to these two places where we normally would have been driving, we saw other cars floating around there.

  This was how it looked every now and then while we were moving toward the Autopista Sur.

We saw cars on a street further down that had water up to the windows and that were floating around on the street! But I was so busy helping Brito looking on the street and all the water that I did not get any good photos. The most of the well lids had disappeared and we were so afraid that we will drive into a hole because then it would be the end of our driving.

Good luck that our car did not stop while we passed all the water masses! We had sometimes to stop on higher hills, one time for about half an hour, to wait for the water masses to get down.

 Finally at Autopista Sur (The motorway south) we ended up in a line of 

cars that were driving very slowly. Big stones falled down from the mountain walls, or was flushed down by the water masses, everywhere! Really dangerous!

 The slow traffic was because parts of this mountain wall had started coming down and 

the police were there checking out that every car could pass safely.

 It was a lot of waterfalls everywhere and the streets were so dirty. It must take months before the streets are cleaned up again, if they ever will be clean again?

As you can see our Puerto de la Cruz trip turned out into an adventure. I thank God that we are alive after all. While it was the worse I thought that we could be flushed away with the water masses somewhere and die. They say that it is only one woman who has died during this bad weather, but the damage is of large-scale.
Our drive from Puerto de la Cruz down to Los Cristianos lasted over 3 hours. It normally takes  about 1 hour and 20 minutes.

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