Lounging in La Palma, Canary Islands

In less than a week, Aviva and I will be heading to La Palma, one of the Canary Islands, where we'll be staying with her aunt and uncle. Needless to say, I'm very excited. Although I'll have to slather on the SPF 50 sunblock to keep from burning my pale self to a crisp, I'm looking forward to basking in the sun, reading some mindless books on the beach, and exploring the island a bit. Aviva and her parents have warned me that there's not much to see or do in La Palma but I'm sure we'll find something to entertain us. Until recently, I didn't even know exactly where the Canary Islands were located, only a vague idea of it being off the coast of north Africa. I've since taken a closer look at a map and improved my geographical sense of the islands in general and La Palma in particular. I also browsed through some online photos and it looks really lovely. Now I'll have a visual image in my head to fuel my daydreams as I work up in the attic over the next few days. If you're interested, you can read the Wikipedia entry about the islands. I'm sure there are more comprehensive sources of information out there but this one seems like a good start.

I thought I'd also include this very cool NASA photo of La Palma as it shows the island's volcano, which looks like a big old dimple when seen from space.

The article also includes a shot of the massive walls of Caldera de Taburiente, 2400m above sea level, taken from gallery.world-traveller.org. Apparently, because the island is so far above sea level, it's become home to more than twelve top-notch international observatories, including thethe Isaac Newton and Wiliam Herschel Telescopes.

There's also a rather prescient article about the threat of tsunamis in the area, which was written in August 2001. Perhaps when scientists predicted that a devastating wave might someday build off the Canary Islands before traveling to Brazil and Florida, they simply had the location a bit off target.