Day 22: Cusco to Lima to Santiago — Goodbye to Peru and Lobsy

by Ted · Published January 28, 2019 · Updated January 30, 2019

Slog of a travel day:

Cusco to Lima, five-hour lay-over, then Lima to Santiago. Chile is 2 hours ahead of Peru and EST so we landed around 1am. It was too late to check into our Airbnb so we got a room at an airport Holiday Inn in Santiago. It was actually clean and comfortable — and thankfully super convenient, literally 100 yards from baggage claim. James was zonked, but I’m not sure Willa could have made it 101 yards. Long day.

Waiting for baggage at 1:30am in Santiago

This was Lobsy’s last day with us (for now!)

She went Cusco-Lima-Miami (overnight) then on to DC. We had a fun last lunch with her at the Lima Airport Tanta — basically a Peruvian version of Houstons with multiple locations, including one on the ocean-front in Miraflores where we had our first lunch with Lobsy 10 days ago.

It was such a fun and memorable journey through Peru with Lobsy. She’s an ideal travel partner: limitless positive energy, super generous and genuinely excited to engage the kids at any time with card games, reading out loud, 20-questions games on the road, etc. etc. We will miss her and can’t wait to see her again in Africa!

Observation: South Americans love kids and respect the family unit.

Examples:

Lots of smiles from people just looking at our kids. Like when someone walks down the street in Manhattan with a puppy. The other day James walked down the aisle of an airplane and a woman reached out and rubbed his cheeks.
The special family lines in security / immigration are a Godsend.
And last night on our 3.5 hour Lima – Santiago flight there was a 1 year old who screamed non-stop for the entire flight. There were no evil-eye looks from anyone — only attempts to help calm the little guy and sympathy for the parents who were also holding the kid’s twin (!). I admit it was good perspective — seemed easy scraping our two iPad-zombies off the seats and dragging them across the street to the Holiday Inn.

Back-to-back one-nighters

Last two nights we had back-to-back one-night-stays. These are thankfully rare during this year of travel. Looking forward to actually unpacking our bags in our Santiago Airbnb.