I know Arsey has a thread going about his ongoing trip to GC but I thought I’d just round this thread off with a summary of our experiences.
Firstly, those of you travelling from the UK probably don’t realise how lucky you are in terms of cheap, direct flights. There aren’t any direct flights from France and as we are old farts we wanted to depart and arrive in daylight so we flew from Barcelona (3h30 flight) which is a 10 hour drive from here. We flew with Veuling who make Ryanair look like a luxury service.
Getting from the airport into Las Palmas was not straightforward - in the end we opted for a taxi (40€).
We stayed at Hotel Apartmentos Bajamar (obviously pronounced Bahamar if you want the taxi driver to understand you!). The apartment was clean and well equipped with a very comfortable bed. It was ideally located about 100 metres from Playa Canteras with lots of cafes, restaurants and a supermarket. We adopted the Irish Rover as our regular beer o’clock establishment and ate in a different restaurant every night which were all OK but none stood out.
We picked up the Stelvio from Canary Ride (5 minute walk from the apartment) the morning after we arrived - professional, friendly service. We set off for the hills using one of the routes they provided. We missed a few turnings and with Google maps rerouting almost instantly we soon found ourselves on gravel tracks pretending to be road which proved fairly testing on the big, heavy bike. Once we got the navigation sorted out we enjoyed 4 good days on the mostly excellent roads. I did find that there was a lot more traffic than I had expected especially the last 20km getting back into Las Palmas in the early evening. The buses on the mountain roads don’t dawdle either.
The trip wasn’t intended to be 100% motorbike, the main aim was to get some sun after we abandoned our camper trip to mainland Spain at the beginning of January because of the bad weather. The weather in GC was very good, generally 20C by midday and cloudless skies. Overall a very enjoyable trip.