When I was in middle school, a young couple moved in next door. Dick was an instructor at the local technical college. Dick met his wife, Chi Chi, while serving in Peru for the Peace Corp.
Normally, I wasn't all that interested in who the neighbors were, but Dick and Chi Chi were looking for a babysitter on date nights, and my mother volunteered me to serve in that role. It was my first and only baby-sitting job, but it was generally a good gig. They would put baby Pablo to sleep and go out on a date, while I would listen to tunes on their nice sound system in the living room and hope that Pablo slept the entire time until his parents came home.
I had no idea how to change a diaper or quiet a crying baby. My mother was next door to bail me out if necessary, but Pablo was a very good sleeper. The first diaper I ever changed was many years later for my daughter Allie.
A second baby Mark eventually arrived, and he was not as good a sleeper as Pablo. My time as a babysitter ended.
Later, I got to know Dick a little better. We played one-on-one basketball on his garage roof rim, and I also played pick-up games on Sunday mornings with Dick and his friends at a local playground. Somewhere along the line, I learned about cuy (guinea pig), one of the national dishes of Peru. Dick and Chi Chi would have family/friends gatherings when they grilled cuy in the backyard. I would peek through the fence in mixed horror/fascination.
Dick and Chi Chi would go back to Peru every couple of years. Chi Chi was from the city of Arequipa. If I recall correctly, her father owned a big factory there.
In college, I had a friend named Daniel who was Jewish but born and raised in Peru. Daniel aspired to be a novel writer, but I don't think that ever happened. For some reason, it sticks in my memory the day that he told me he had his first dream in English. I ran into him years later when my kids were young. He was married and working for a tech company in Madison.
After that, I didn't think much about Peru until Julia began weaving with a loom that a friend owned but didn't use. There are weaving villages in the mountains of Peru, and Julia put it on her bucket list to visit a weaving village in the Sacred Valley, the Inca Trail and Machu Picchu. That trip was supposed to occur during the year after Julia retired, but the pandemic shut down Peru's tourism economy in 2020.
In fact, the Inca Trail itself was shut down during the pandemic, and the jungle started to take the trail back. Our guide told us that when hiking resumed, two porters died after separately being bitten by very poisonous snakes who normally avoid he trail.
Inca Trail hiking slowly resumed in 2021 with just a few small groups. Our guide told us that things were pretty much back to normal in 2022. The government allows 200 hikers per day to start the four day trek to Machu Picchu. By contrast, 5000 visitors per day are allowed to travel by train and bus to Machu Picchu.
On September 24th, we drove to Chicago and took American Airlines to Dallas and then to Lima. Our flights were perfectly on-time, and our luggage arrived safely.
We slept for a few hours at the hotel across from the Lima airport and then boarded a smaller domestic plane to Cusco, elevation 11,152 feet. Here, our Peru adventure begins.
