Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Wow, how time flies! (Heading home...)

The last month of the trip was kind of bittersweet, both in knowing it was coming to an end, and having to stay in place, when there were so many other places we wanted to visit...

We woke up in our small adobe room we had been staying in, at Adam's Tierra Langla, on the 4th of March.  It was such a strange feeling to realize that it had already been one full year that we had been away.  I was both excited to return, but also not wanting to be finished yet.

We had a semi easy journey to complete, in order to get to the airport in Lima, and semi easy meaning up to this point, we've already traveled some 14,000 miles, so another 2 hour bus ride is literally nothing!

We said our goodbyes to all of the people at Tierra Langla, and with our bags packed, trudged up the dirt driveway to the street above.

Within minutes, a passing collectivo van stopped, and we threw our backpacks on top of the van, and brought our guitars inside.  A rather short journey back to Imperial, and then Canete, where we boarded "Peru Bus" headed for Lima.  We were graced with a sleazy Steven Segal movie all the way there, which of course was dubbed horribly in Spanish.

When we got to Lima, we jumped into a cab, and within about a half hour, we were at the airport.  Now it really felt like we were heading home...We had a few hours to kill, and started by stuffing our semi-malnourished bodies with a healthy serving of McDonalds Quarter Pounders, that perhaps never tasted so good, especially since we had been eating mostly vegan for the past month.

Our flight was supposed to leave at 1 AM, and was almost an hour late, so we were a little worried about our connecting flight in Atlanta.  When we arrived there, it was bright and early, and nobody was in the airport, so our connection was smooth, and quick.  It was pretty funny, going through US immigration, as the officer looked at my well worn passport, with what seemed like hundreds of stamps, especially from Chile and Argentina...He asked how long I was gone, and when I told him a year, he asked "why?"  Then he asked how Peru was, and how I was able to make it back in one piece...I told him he should get out more.

We boarded our second plane, and we were slightly disappointed that nobody greeted us in Spanish...Now was the final stretch...We would be in Los Angeles in a few hours, and my mom would be there to pick us up from the airport, one year later.