Travelling just after the summer break is over we’ve discovered is a great time to travel. It’s less busy and for this trip’s two destinations the weather was still good. Our trip started with an early wake up call to catch our first leg flight to Newark on our way to Tenerife. At 6am getting to the airport was a breeze as was getting through check-in and security. Our flight time was roughly 5 hours and the flight was quite pleasant with breakfast served shortly after take off. We had a 4 hour layover in Newark and decided to spend most of it in the new UA lounge. The second leg was a red eye into Tenerife. While on this flight we observed that a bunch of the passengers seemed to know each other and were travelling as a group. Turns out they were travelling to Tenerife for a wedding and the groom was sitting right in front of us; we later discovered they were also staying at the same hotel as us! The UA flight was interesting, the flight service was a bit chaotic and felt quite rushed, probably because the flight attendants wanted to get dinner service done quickly so passengers would go to sleep and they could chill out for most of the flight. It seemed to work for us at least as we took a sleeping pill with dinner and were fast asleep shortly thereafter. Our trusty neck pillows helped make this red eye comfortable and we got a decent 4 hours sleep on a 7 hour flight. All in all our travel time to get to Tenerife was 29 hours, so sleeping was key to making it through day one.
Right before we boarded the flight to Tenerife we were checking on our car rental and started reading horrible reviews about Hertz and how they scammed customers and over charged people. Z being a loyalty Hertz member had booked our car with a pretty good price and all our other times renting from them we had no issues, but these reviews we found were BAD!! So at the last minute, literally, we rebooked our car rental through Sixt, got a lower price with mobile check-in, and ended up with brand new Audi Q2 manual car with only 11km on it. Our flight was slightly early landing and going through immigration was easy; another stamp for the passport. We got the car in a jiffy and were on the road to our hotel, the Ritz-Carlton, Abama. The roadways on Tenerife are amazingly smooth, well kept and fun to drive. The main highway TF-1 has a 120km/hr speed limit. Drivers are good at using the left lane as an actual passing lane on the island… what a concept! Our car was equipped with speed detection, much to Z’s annoyance, as it beeped every time he exceeded the speed limit. Needless to say one of the first things I had to google was how to disable this, but when we discovered we’d have to disable each time we started the car, we just got used to the beeping. 🤣
Our hotel was about a half hour from the airport and the drive there gave us really great views of the island and the ocean. Tenerife is a very mountainous island with a lot of barren, dry land. The island has an inactive volcano that last erupted in the 1900s and the lava formed much of the landscape seen today. The island however, is stunningly beautiful, with much fauna growing out of the lava rock, areas of treed forest, and countless banana plantations. Being a mountainous island, the roads are curvy with elevation gains and de elevation, making for some extremely breathtaking views towards the ocean or inland towards the mountain ranges.
When we arrived at the hotel, our upgraded one bedroom suite was not quite ready so while we waited we had some lunch and explored the hotel grounds a bit. The entire hotel had recently been fully renovated and our suite was immaculate. Just upon entering was a dining table with a large bench against the wall. From there was a large living room with a couch large and chez lounger enough for maybe 8 people to sit comfortably. To the left was the bedroom with king sized bed and a single seater chair. Both the living room and bedroom had access to a large bedroom that overlooked a lower level terrace and had an ocean view. There was a large closet, more than enough for our stuff and the bathroom had a great walk in shower, a separate tub and double sinks.
The hotel resort is situated on a large hillside property with the lobby on level 6 which is street level. It is nicely laid out with both a train and funicular that will take you to Playa Abama which is a nice man made cove and is great for swimming and has snorkelling around the lava rocks on either side and by the large rock formations blocking the open North Atlantic Ocean. On each level of the resort leading down to the beach you can find a descent sized swimming pool with ample loungers. The hotel has a few restaurant options on site and for our first evening we chose to eat at Verde Mar, a different restaurant concept that focuses in fresh vegetable dishes as the main course and meat or seafood dishes as the sides. Overall it was a great dining experience with really delicious food, I just realized too late that I needed to be very specific that I like my meat cooked well done. Our stay included a lovely buffet breakfast at La Veranda and as the name suggests we got to eat breakfast each morning outside on the veranda. The breakfast spread was quite impressive and needless to say we only needed a light lunch snack before supper each day. We also ate at El Mirador twice and as the name suggests the viewpoint from this restaurant was stunning as it overlooking the ocean and was the best place to see the sunset.
The resort was fantastic and while we probably could have spent our entire time hanging out there between the playa and the pools, we wanted to explore as much of the island as possible as we could and we had rented a car to do it.
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