Day 108 - Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025 – Gran Carania, Canary Islands

Our last excursion. I did not count them, but it had to be the last of about 50 give or take. I have to admit by now I am a little tired of excursions. Thankfully this last one was a good one. I would hate to have ended on a sour note. Because we were leaving by mid afternoon this was only a four or excursion. What follows is a jam packed 4 hours. 1st we drove up to a town Arusus. It was a picturesque town like any of the dozen we've seen in Europe to this point. Of course it had a church. Mary went in and got plenty of pictures. At this stage of the trip, I think we've seen somewhere near 400 and 500 churches. Or, is that just the way I feel? 😉 If you thought you had, Mary likes churches and cathedrals. I am not complaining. It is just an observation.

From town we drove quite a while until we pulled up into a parking lot of a rum distillery. I have never been a fan of Rome, but I'm not going to turn down an opportunity to test to this theory. Plus, I always like the process places like wineries, olive oil pressers, etcetera. The majority of the rum is made here is made from sugar cane. At one point, the tour guide mentioned rum being made by honey, but I didn't get the full description. It's possible that some of the rums here was made from honey, but I'm not sure. The tour went on to explain how rum was fermented and then distilled and then put into steel tanks and then how some of it went into oak barrels. A lot of it was very much like any whiskey or bourbon distillery process. Nonetheless, it was very interesting. We then went into the barrel room. There were hundreds and hundreds of barrels. There was one section that had people's names written on the outside of the barrel. Apparently, you can buy a barrel and put your name on it. As it ages you can take some out of the barrel to test it. I thought this was a pretty cool idea if you liked rum. At the end of the tour there was a tasting. We tried two or three straight rums. They were of different years and or with oak and without. They had two or three very high end ones that you had to pay extra for. We decided to pay €8 to try one of the higher end ones. Neither Mary nor I liked it enough to buy a $70 bottle. Then they had the, what I will call, silly rums. These were rum mixed with different ingredients like lemon or chocolate. They were not bad, but hardly what a real rum drinker would consider serious. Anyway, we did buy a silly rum. I can just imagine the people who run the place think silly Americans will buy any damn thing. Mary also bought the postcards and refrigerator magnet here. She was able to mail the postcards from here which was nice.

You would think for a four-hour excursion we would be done. You would think wrong. We then drove up to the highest point in the island where we could look down inside the volcano crater. I will let the pictures do the talking, but it was an amazing sight. Mary got out of the van and walked towards the edge a little closer for better pictures. It was a great way to end a very good excursion.

We drove back down into town. Closer to the cruise terminal there was a market of sorts. There were a few stores where our tour guide pointed Mary to buy T-shirts. From there, we drove back to the ship. It was a very nice excursion. It was crazy what we got accomplished in four hours.

Once back on the ship, I'm sure we went to dinner. I did not record what we had that night. Nor did I record what we did afterwards. We probably went straight to bed. Another successful day.

It was a great way to end our excursions on. There's no real way to rank the excursions we've been on. I'm sure Mary has a different opinion than mine. I will have to spend some time after the cruise is over and go through my notes to see if I can come up with the top three or five. This might be in the top 10 for sure. Maybe even the top five.