October 9, 2009

We start our journey home today. We are leaving Cusco at 11:50am but don’t fly out of Lima until mid night tonight. Gotta love the International flights from Peru! The flight from Cusco to Lima is short - only about 65 minutes. Upon arrival in Lima we checked our luggage into the secured airport storage. We grabbed a taxi and headed to the Miraflores area. The weather in Lima was chilly and damp. I was glad that I brought an extra jacket along as I was chilly in my light sweatshirt.

We grabbed a light lunch, light compared to our other meals. We all had sandwiches, except Chuck who had a great big ice cream sundae for lunch. For some odd reason he has been craving ice cream this trip. Anyhow after that we wandered the streets and found the “market”. This market actually contained a lot of the same stuff that we found in Cusco only the prices were a little higher. We decided to grab a drink at a bar just to kill some time before we found our dinner spot. We asked a person at a tourist booth in Lima where they would recommend we go for Ceviche. Ceviche is another Peruvian dish that is made from raw seafood with lime and lemon juice and some seasoning. We found our restaurant we chose was called Alfresco in the Miraflores area. We asked our waiter what he would recommend for the Ceviche. We ended up settling on the mixed Ceviche and the Tiradito that was recommended by our waiter. The Tiradito consisted of three small dishes of raw white fish (Flounder) in different sauces. One sauce was a yellow chili sauce that was not spicy, the second was a cilantro sauce and the third was a sauce made from vinegar, garlic and oil. I tried all of the dishes but I just don’t seem to like raw fish for one reason or another. I still taste the fish. For my main dish I ordered swordfish with garlic and spices served over a side of creamy corn, which was delicious. The corn was not like American corn, the kernels were huge. Our dinner took about 2.5 hours, we intentionally ate slow but the service in Peru is slower than in the States. There is no reason to rush! We called our the taxi driver that picked dropped us off and he came and picked us up and took us back to the airport. We checked in, paid our exit tax and headed through security. We said our good-byes to Joel, Pat and Jonathan and waited for our plane to board.

I slept off and on for part of the flight to Miami. We arrived here around 5:45 this morning and went through customs. That process was relatively pain free! We expected to be able to check our luggage right back in but we were not able to do that because we were more than 6 hours early for our flight. So we had to sit with our luggage for a little while. When we returned to the check in area there were long lines everywhere, it was a mess! I can honestly say the airports in Peru were far more organized than the Delta ticketing in Miami. I was finally able to get our boarding passes printed, which was a challenge since half the machines were not working. Upon the suggestion of a Delta employee we went to check our baggage at the curb. After waiting in that line for about 20 minutes we found out you could only check baggage for Delta on the curb, which made no sense to me sine they are the same company. Anyhow we returned inside and waited in line for an hour to check our baggage. The Delta/NW staff in Miami need a lesson on how to efficiently check baggage. After we got our luggage checked we headed through security. Going through security was fast and easy, unlike checking the baggage. We grabbed a bite to eat and wasted a couple of hours in the Miami airport before boarding the plane. I don’t remember take off, I guess I fell asleep but woke up about an hour into the flight and downloaded the rest of our photos. We arrived safe and sound at 6:00 in MSP to chilly weather. I think I need to move someplace warm!