OK, it's cheesy - I'll make a nicer one later

This is a story with a couple of threads to it:

Firstly, after eight years or so of civvie life, I decided to go back to the Canadian Army full time, including a tour in Afghanistan.

Yes, I did get outside the wire

One of the benefits that comes with the tour is something called HLTA, which is a period of leave out of theatre back in Canada. HLTA stands for "Home Leave Travel Assistance", which is technically the program that funds it, but we all use the abbreviation to refer to the home leave period.

In a remarkable display of common sense, the Army doesn't make you go back to Canada for HLTA. You can if you want to, but my tour was over the winter period, and my HLTA block started Christmas day and ended mid-January. Who wants to go back to nasty snowy Ontario in the dead of winter? Instead, you have the option of travelling anywhere in the world, and flying your next of kin there to meet you - with the caveat that the Queen will only underwrite the cost of travel to fly you to Canada.

In a nutshell, it costs $x to fly you from Afghanistan to Canada. You can spend $x to fly yourself and your next of kin anywhere else you want, but any costs greater than $x you cover yourself, and if the travel costs are cheaper than $x, you can't spend that money on other things. Travel only. You get a vaction anywhere in the world, and you only pay for lodging, food, and fun. And you only have to go to war to get it.

It is a remarkably fair system, and my hat is off to whoever devised it.

So then, where to go?

My criteria were as follows:

  1. It had to be warm, preferably with a beach;
  2. But not too warm;
  3. It should lie roughly halfway between Afganistan and Canada, so as to not bone one of us with a ridiculously long flight to get there; and
  4. The flights to get the two of us there needed to add up to very close to $x. I'd go a little over, but not much.

So out comes the map. The southern Greek Islands looked tempting... but a buddy of mine with connections to the Greek Mafia (mostly kidding) warned me off as being both too cold and too dead in Dec-Jan.

Then I noticed the Canary Islands. Almost perfectly halfway. Warm, "springlike" climate all year round. Black sand beaches. A volcano. Belongs to Spain, so Euro in nature (downside, I speak English and French, but no Spanish) and a major holiday destination for the UK, Germany, and Scandanavia (so the place would be crawling with Brits, Germans, and Finns - meaning the locals would probably speak some English. And besides, it would be like getting side trips to Germany and the UK.

We narrowed it down to the island of Tenerife. Now it was time to decide where on the island to go.

The Tiede Mar Aprtments

We knew we wanted to rent an apartment, rather than stay in a hotel. An apartment would get us cooking facilities and a fridge, which meant we could live off the land a little bit and save some money. Some searching on Expedia netted us Apartments Tiede Mar, in Puerto De La Cruz, for an amazing price. So we took it.

At this point, we really had no idea of what the difference between the different locations on Tenerife were really like - but man, did we luck out. Because Puerto De La Cruz turned out to be perfect, and we had the best vacation ever.

This site is about sharing what we learned as first-timers to Tenerife - what to see, stuff to know, pitfalls to avoid, and generally things to help you survive your Tenerife vacation. Enjoy!