Early Early Morning

To fly to Peru, you need to take either a PCR COVID test 3 days before your departure or an antigen test 24 hours before your departure. Obviously, either of these tests has to come back negative to be able to fly. You also need to fill out a health affidavit form. 

We were super stressed out about the covid tests all week before the flights. I actually couldn't sleep last Wednesday night because I kept thinking about getting a positive test. So I got a test on Thursday to ease my mind (which of course was negative). Then got my actual test on Friday for the flight. It was all stress for nothing but it was definitely part of the experience leading up to our trip. 

When we bought our Peru tickets, we got a steal of a deal with American Airlines back in May or June. The tickets were great because both there and back we stopped in Dallas. Plus the take-off times were nice and normal for the most part. Thennnnn American decided to lay off a bunch of people and cancel a bunch of flights. So they moved our departure flight to stop in Miami and leave at 5am. Yes, our plane left MSP at 5am. So we were kind of dreading that aspect of the whole trip. 

Luckily, my mom is awesome and drove us to the airport at 2:30am (!!!). I slept an hour or two because I was still tired from the stress. Lacey didn't sleep at all. 

5am takeoff from MSP

Arrival at the airport was great (thanks again mom!). This was a particularly nerve-wracking check-in because we not only had to have the usual passport, confirmation codes, packed things the right way etc. We also had to have the negative covid test and the health affidavit form. We couldn't get the form to work all week. Then at the airport, I used this thing called Google and figured out what we were doing wrong. We checked in, went through security, and it was easy peasy. 

Both flights were fairly uneventful. We got moved to an exit row seat on our flight from Miami to Peru which was nice. Except for the other guy in the row with us just wanted to talk to us all the time. He even asked Lacey to go half and half on different sandwiches! It was so weird! Lacey kept putting in her earbuds and eventually he got the hint. He wasn't hitting on her really (I was sitting there) but he just kept talking and talking. 

The 5 minute cab ride was HAIR RAISING

The food was fine. We only got pretzels on the Miami flight. On the flight to Lima, we got a sandwich, chips, and delicious brownies. I was surprised they had food! 

Lacey watched movies and slept since she didn't sleep the night before. I read a new book I bought that's really good and watched a couple movies. Overall, easy flights. 

The last flight anecdote was that the flight to Lima was almost all Peruvians. Like, without Covid, that flight would have been a ton of people just like me and Lace going down for Machu Picchu. It was very interesting and kind of a theme for our first couple of days. 

We landed in Lima and went through security which was fine. We chose not to get Sim cards this trip for our cell phones because 4 of the days we will be on the Inca trail with no internet either way. We found the taxi stand for our shuttle to our hotel that's just across a busy road from the airport (our flight to Cusco was at 6am so we had to leave our hotel at 4am). 

Peruvian Fried Rice at the Hotel

The shuttle ride was surprisingly crazy because our van had to go across like 5 lanes of insane traffic in about 100 ft. There are no stoplights in the area. It was wild. 

The hotel was nice (Holiday Inn so standardized). It seems the area is not super great because there were like security guards and all the workers were quite strict about everything. We ended up eating at the hotel restaurant even though it was insanely overpriced because we didn't know what else to do. Lacey's rice was an asian/peruvian fusion. I got a stew that was fine. Lacey won this round. 

We watched a little bit of a movie and then went to bed before 9pm. Our alarms were for 3:30am.