Last day in South America.

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Hello everybody,

We're back at the hotel in Lima for our last day in South America (for this trip, that is...). We fly out of here at 11:00 tonight, and get in to Minneapolis at 1 pm tomorrow. Should be a fun trip...! After we get home, we will sweep into action, moving to Iowa City and setting up our new home there.

We´ve spent the past few days making our way back from Colombia / Ecaudor to Màncora, Peru, where we stayed for 3 days. Mancora is a surfing town in the north of Peru where tourists from all over Peru, South America, and the rest of the world go to relax, surf, and party (though it is mostly people from Lima vacationing there!). They are supposed to be a top surfing destination throughout the world, but the big waves are in the summer (our winter), thus we didn´t see a lot of evidence for this. There were definitely some waves, but the problem was that the ground where the waves were was rocky, not sandy, so we got a bit banged up, but we caught some waves on our bodyboards. Mancora seems like a small beach town in California: everyone there seemed to be our age, and we would see the same people every day, at the beach during the day and at the restaurants and bars at night. And everyone there has plenty of money, many of them are private school kids from Lima who have loads and loads of it. It also had a bit of California-ness (or Florida-ness?) in the swimwear.... let´s just say you don´t see anything like it in old Iowa.

All in all, we had a great time just relaxing and soaking up some sun before we have to head back to the real world of studying and moving and everything else! The whole trip itself has been a success, we´ve had no real problems at all. FYI, our cell phone did change hands somewhere along the way in Ecuador (along with Mariel´s new $3 fake desinger sunglasses), so we don´t have that anymore.

Anyway, we can´t wait to see all of you very soon!!!

Love, Mariel and Ben

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