The Adventure Begins!
With an early flight out of Detroit, we stayed at the Westin in the Airport, which everyone else seemed to be doing as well, as it took over an hour to get a table at the one restaurant in the Hotel. Nevertheless, it’s always a nice place to stay and bell services are kind enough to take all the bags with us to International checkin, which was also a Zoo. Even with Clear and Sky Priority and someone helping us with the bags it was stressful, but as always we made it through and into the SkyClub. I changed out to an Exit Row seat in Comfort+, which ended up being a bad choice because with extra crew jumpseating, I basically was staring at the crew the whole flight, couldn’t keep my bags under the seat, and people were standing around for the bathroom.
In Atlanta we made it to the outdoor SkyClub in the International Terminal and got to relax. A family next to us were traveling to Florida, and we ended up talking for over 30 minutes about Legos. Its always good to pass the time with a cocktail and sunny weather.
Because of air traffic in Jacksonville, our plane was an hour late taking off, but unlike some of our other International flights, it was only 6 hours, and it passed by quickly with GameBoy, watching the new Indiana Jones and Dumb Money, and some wine of course. Before we knew it was 10pm and we were in Lima. Getting through Customs wasn’t bad, it almost makes me wonder if anyone checks bags anymore, but it made our life easier. Walking out of Baggage Claim there was a Taxi counter, and for $80US on the card they found us a legit Taxi driver to get us to the Hotel. This guy was hilarious! He wanted to talk to me, but between his broken English and my broken Spanish, it wasn’t working. So he pulled out the Peruvian version of Google Translate and, while shifting, was dictating what he said, then passing the phone to me to translate my response. This went on for over 20 minutes with the traffic. We talked about whales, sea otters, Cusco, and everything else. At the end of our trip, he offered to take us back to the Airport, which we were doing in a few days to meet our guides. Without exchanging numbers or agreeing on a price, he simply said ‘Saturday, 6pm’ and said he would see us there. We got all of our bags up to our room at the AC Hotel Miraflores, and crashed after a long day.
