Lima-Miraflores

First off, about this blog.  The main purpose of creating this is to help me document our travels. Second is to help family and friends catch up with what we’re doing.  I will try to do a post for every place we go.  I will update when I can. It will NOT be on a daily basis.  Also, I’m doing this on my phone. There will be errors in grammar and spelling. I’m not going to worry about those.

And we’re off!

At about 3pm on Saturday December 28th we left all of our kids at home and began our adventure. Our first flight was to LAX and then after a short layover we began our overnight flight to Lima, Peru. Flights went well, hardly any sleep, but that was expected.

A driver met us at the Lima airport and drove the 30 minutes, most of which was along the beach, to our hotel in the Miraflores area of Lima. It’s basically the beach area. Our hotel had so much charm with a few courtyard areas too. 

Since it was only 9am, we dropped our bags at the hotel and walked the few blocks to get a good view of the beach and ocean. It’s a beautiful area where the town is on the cliffs above the beach.

Then we headed to a plaza area close by. Can’t believe my luck when the park area of the plaza was also a cat park. There were several cat “houses” that they had built and there were just lots of cats all over. It was a warm welcome on our first day. (Side note, I’m not sure how I’m going to make it six weeks without my own kitties 😿)

We spent time exploring the plaza and stopped at a cafe for brunch. Since we still had more time to kill before checking into the hotel we walked back closer to the beach.  We went into an  alpaca museum and learned all about the different types of camels (llamas, alpacas, etc) they have in South America. First off, who knew alpaca and llamas were camels? Not me.  They also talked to us about how the hairs are used/made into textiles. Very interesting. From there we went to a shopping area that was just a big outdoor mall like one you would see in San Diego.  It was very American from the stores to the restaurants. With it being close to a holiday and students just getting out for summer break, it was busy.  

Finally, it was time to get checked in and take a short break. However it wasn’t too long before we were in an Uber and headed a bit further up the beach for our big adventure of the day-paramotoring! We got to fly over the beach! It was such an exciting experience! We held GoPros to capture the experience. If those videos ever get sent to us I’ll post them. Matt was brave enough to take a few photos mid flight. They gave him a necklace to hook his phone onto. I did not get one, so I was not about to risk dropping my phone-oh and also one of my straps came unbuckled. Yikes! Luckily I knew I was strapped in several other places.  

They seriously only took about 30 seconds to strap me in before I took off

This is a photo Matt took on his run of the people paramotoring- shows a cool view of what we did

Such a fun activity for our first day in Peru! However by now I was exhausted and Matt still had to exercise, so we went back to the hotel. It was nice to just chill and get a bit settled for a few hours.

For dinner we walked over to a restaurant and had some very traditional Peruvian food. Matt got his ceviche and seafood stew and I got a grilled meat and veggies dish. It was very yummy. 

We also stopped into a market and bought some Inca Kola. Had to try the local flavors! It’s a caffeinated soda that was very much a mix of cream soda and that fake banana flavor-think a banana runt.  It was good, but very sweet. 

Then we called it an early night because we were going off no sleep and had a morning flight the next day. Just before midnight our friends Ann-Marie and Dave Proctor flew into Lima. They stayed at the airport hotel, but we’ll meet up with them tomorrow morning. Sadly, at about 2am my stomach went south-of course. Ugh. We all know not to drink the water or brush your teeth with it, but I forgot and had ice in my drink with dinner.   Luckily we came prepared with meds for just that, so other than lost sleep, it didn’t impact me too much.