Due to the high demand for limited tickets, we had booked our Inca Trail trek about a year in advance. Well, the time finally was upon us! After returning from the jungle trip, we had a few days to prepare for the 4 day, 40ish km hike. We were pretty concerned about doing the trek leading up to it because Nancy's feet had been giving her problems, and we could not delay the trek at all. But on departure day she was feeling up to the challenge, and we were picked up super early once again for a 2 hour bus trip out of Cusco. On the bus we found out we had a relatively small group, there were just 10 of us and 2 guides. Our fellow hikers were from England, Portugal, and the States: ... read more

After the sand dunes in Huacachina we jumped back on one of our friendly buses and headed southeast, working our way into more central southern Peru. We spent many hours going through spectacular country side. Looking out the window we saw endless plains, giant mountains, pristine looking rivers, flocks of sheep and alpaca, terraced land, ancient handmade rock fences, spectacular sky, lightning shows, simple mud houses, and most locals wearing the traditional colourful Peruvian clothes. All of these more than made up for the fact that our long bus ride almost doubled in length thanks to a labour strike of some sort; a long delay due to a road closure to accommodate a popular car race of some kind; and an eerie bus transfer done at a dark lonely deserted gas station overrun with somewhat wild ... read more

The flight from Denver was a full day of travel that went smoothly and allowed for lots of movie watching. At the Lima airport we were greeted pleasantly by our pre-booked taxi driver who was waiting for us with our names on a sign, we felt like high rollers! She got us safely (although her van took a beating) to our home stay location in Miraflores, a region of Lima about an hour of adventurous driving through thick traffic from the airport. There we were greeted by our host, a super sweet woman who has a fantastic house where we stayed the entire week during our spanish school. Our spanish school was a well-run agency about a half hour walk from our new house. From Monday to Friday we spent a half day at the school, ... read more

After a brief but meaningful visit to Cambridge we made our way to Murfreeseboro, Tennessee where sister Alanna and her family migrated to a year ago. Nothing eventful happened along the way, except for discovering a spectacular Mediterranean / Greek restaurant outside of Dayton, Ohio. Our time was well spent in Tennessee, finally getting an opportunity to hang with the kids - swimming, go carting, bazooka ball, Walking Dead, ear piercing and birthday cake. Gabe's high school was celebrating homecoming so we even got to participate in the craziness of high school football - marching bands, cheerleaders, dance squad (yes there is a difference between the two), flag twirlers, homecoming queen and her attendants, mascots and die hard fans. And football isn't even that big at Gabe's school compared to most U.S. schools! We had an ... read more

OK, so we're not really in the Philippines anymore. We're now home, and sadly our three month epic journey has come to an end. What a trip! We've not posted for a while, as we really enjoyed the last couple weeks of chilling in different parts of the Philippines. After flying out of Cairns, Australia we traveled to Manila. We found much of the Philippines is a great place to visit. However, Manila, the capital, does not remotely fall into this category. We hastily got out of the massive, smog-ridden town and bussed north to try to get in some more surfing, as we'd heard that San Fernando has reliable waves. It turns out 'reliable' is not the words we would use, as although there was a nice beach, the only waves to be seen were ... read more