[[ Posted January 13, 2018. Referring back to November 18, 2017 ]]

I love Thanksgiving in America. Its always great to spend time with family and / or friends and eat way too much of the usual suspects: turkey, gravy, green bean casserole, and whatever else I fancy.

This year I did something a little different. Embarking on my first trip to the southern hemisphere, I headed down Peru with my buddy Cooper. We had a limited number of days, but we decided that a trek to Machu Picchu was a must. Its probably the most touristy thing you can do in Peru, and maybe all of South America, but I have my concerns that its not going to be accessible to people forever, at least not without waiting lists or lotteries for permits.

Any trip to Machu Picchu likely starts with a flight to Lima, and then an in-country hop to 11,000 ft above sea level in Cusco. This trip was compliments of Chase Bank, who kindly dispensed 100,000 points (good for $1500 on travel) when I signed up for their Chase Sapphire Reserve Card. Thanks Chase!

Flights to Lima from Atlanta are weird, and we arrived around 12:35am. Our flight to Cusco was at 5:30am, so we had some time to kill. Rather than pay for a hotel for a few hours, we decided to power through in an airport lounge. Cheaper plan, but it definitely resulted in no sleep. Finally, we hit the ground in Cusco and the fun began.

Our hotel, Torre Dorado, was nothing short of awesome. The service and kindness of the people was top notch. The rooms are nice and clean as well. We were about a mile from the city center, so it wasn’t the most convenient location, but it was in a nice area and I would highly recommend it. Shuttles to the center were either free, or only cost us 2-3 soles (which we would pronounce “souls” for the entire trip) because the taxi prices are government regulated. That amounts to about 1 USD.

The hotel let us check in at 10am (AWESOME!) so we dropped our stuff and headed out for an early lunch. Since we were new to Cusco, we decided to walk the mile to the center and see what we could see on the way.

 

We hit a restaurant called “Fallen Angel”. It looked like it would be quite the party scene at night, and had plenty of interesting decor including this giant angel, and disco balls.

The food and drinks were solid.

Right as we wrapped up eating, Cusco got hit but a huge hailstorm. There were pea-sized hail pellets dropping into the courtyard where we ate (though it was covered) and tons of noise as it hammered down on the roof. When it finally stopped, we emerged outside to find the city covered covered in white.

I got a brief nap in later in the afternoon, and then we had a pre-trek meeting with our group. After a quick dinner and some last minute trek-shopping, we called it a day.