Gratitude Series 2018, Day Twenty Seven: A Travel Destination

That outfit tho

I'm thankful that I had the chance to visit Peru.  My youngest brother Mitchell was a foreign exchange student in Peru 10 years ago, so my family took a trip to visit him.  Our trip included both mountain time and beach time, as well as a day in Lima and a meal at a fantastic restaurant called La Mar.

My favorite part was the mountains.  I'm lucky enough to live in the Sierra Nevadas, and spent a year living in the Colorado Rockies, which are both spectacular in their own right.  But the Andes are some next level shiz.  You can't believe how high they reach, and how straight up they stand, almost like skyscrapers.  I'd never seen anything like it - so beautiful, so majestic.  It was also very interesting to see the Incan ruins (most notably Machu Picchu, but there are several in the area) and think about how older societies functioned and how surprisingly advanced they were.  (Like, a modern construction crew would have trouble figuring out the logistics of building Machu Picchu given it's remote and high altitude location, but the Incans figured it out without airplanes or excavators hundreds of years ago.)

It was interesting to get the chance to visit a culture that was so different from my own, and to try to navigate in a place where most people spoke Spanish.  These are the kind of trips that only come along a few times in a lifetime, if ever, and I'm so grateful for the experience and the memories.