We took off 7:30am, quite early as the Sun still hiding behind the mountains. We planned to be at the airport at 8:30am to drop off the car at Opodo. By the way we got it quite cheap fro around £75 + car insurance, the firm was called “Orlando”. Funny enough in the return instructions it said to return the car to the parking and leave the car unlocked with the keys under the mat. Can you imagine car like that parked in London? I can’t as it would be gone in an instant.
Filled the tank with another 20EUR to be exactly half as we picked up and went down the parking. Parking at La Palma airport is very narrow and one of the turns when leaving airport is so steep and narrow that cars quite often bruise it. I took the pictures of the car when we parked it just to make sure we return the same as we picked up. Kind of a habit to take pictures when picking up and when leaving, especially when you dealing with companies like Dollar, which once for us didn’t mark all the scratches on the rental sheet
Actually when we just arrived the man who gave us the car was standing there so he came to us and took the keys. So good we didn’t have to leave the keys under the mat! I was a bit scared if they don’t find the car, what happens then?! All was good and he said I will get my deposit automatically (which was 345EUR).
We dropped the car and we went straight to check-in desks to drop the luggage. The airport is quite small (I think only 10 departure gates), but good we left good 2.5 hours before flight, as the queue to drop the luggage was very long and wasn’t moving at all. It was mostly elderly people in the queue. There is even a joke that only German pensioners are visiting La Palma, which is partly true, since there are a lot of elderly German tourists in La Palma and I’ve noticed that when I was living there. So, the drop off took as whole 45 minutes in the queue! Mortifying! Good we had plenty of time! Also we queued by accident in the speedy boarding queue, which sounded like a joke. Somebody behind us even laughed at it, since the queue was moving in snail pace. Easy Jet speedy boarding. If you haven’t seen ‘Come Fly with me’ episode about speedy boarding you should! It was very close to that experience LOL.
Once we dropped our luggage, my friend came to pick up the tent that my friend gave away to him as well as some left over tuna and coca cola cans that were left over and we didn’t want to throw away. After that we sat down for coffee in a canteen before passing the security and we balanced out our Splitwise balances. If you haven’t heard of the app I totally recommend it when travelling. Easy to sort out who is paying and how much. I’ve got my 50EUR back.
Security check was very quick. Literally no queue and they didn’t really check much there. So like 1-2 minutes in total.
Then we stopped at Duty Free shop to look around. I saw a bottle of Rum con Miel, which is Rum with Honey – very local drink from La Palma. I’ve grabbed a bottle for 9.80EUR, which was quite a good price. Though it is only 20% of alcohol. I also sprayed some perfume hoping I will find something I like, but in the end just ended up smelling nice and didn’t buy any.
We thought we had plenty of time, but my friend barely managed to buy some water and the air-plane was boarding already. Maybe because it is was full of elderly people (no disrespect) it started boarding an hour before as they were quite slow and then we had waited for another 30 minutes in the aircraft.
The air-plane took off in time.