Home!

I feel like I've forgotten how to blog (and boy, is going to work going to be a shock tomorrow morning!), but here we are, back in New Haven. The trip was amazing!

After the work part, we traveled around the Sacred Valley, staying in small towns at the base of mountains and running up the mountains in the mornings to see Inca ruins. Although running is kind of overstating things--Kevin ran, and I trudged, breaking into a slow jog from time to time. Not till the last day, when we ran from Aguas Calientes to Machu Picchu (Aguas Calientes is the town at the base of the mountain where most people stay when they visit Machu Picchu) did I actually manage to run most of the run. And then we climbed up to the top of Huayna Picchu (the mountain looming in the back of every picture of Machu Picchu you've ever seen), which is where we took this picture.


See all the Switchbacks?

It turns out that I'm not very good at high elevations--not till the last day (and MP is at a lower elevation than most of the other Inca sites) could I run without my hands and/or feet getting slightly numb, never mind being completely out of breath. But it was definitely worth it--there's nothing like looking ahead to a challenge, thinking it looks impossible, and then discovering several hours later than you've done it after all.

Plus, then we got to do yoga at the top!


Finally Catching my Breath!

We (Kevin) are still working on organizing our pictures in Flickr, and I have all kind of knitting to report (I finished Hanami, and started yet another pair of Monkeys), and some fiber-y pictures (and purchases), but I'm going to spread that out over the next bunch of days.

There's more yarniness than there might otherwise be because we absolutely lucked out with our tour guide--we picked Inca Runners as a tour company because of the running, but Hanny turned out to be a vegetarian, and she used to work with a group of knitters, dyeing yarn using natural dyes and then selling the sweaters they made, and she didn't mind that Kevin and I are kind of non-chatty, except when we forget we're meant to be on vacation and start babbling about archives, so she was really a perfect match for us. Non-chatty, vegetarian knitting runners should definitely ask for Hanny when they visit the Sacred Valley.

Anyway... it turns out that I want to write about everything at once, right this second, so I'll stop now before this gets out of hand, and save some for later.

[In less good news, someone stole Vespy while we were gone. I'm pretty upset about it--they left the cover so poor Vespy is now getting rained on! and for some reason, it's making me sad about the death of my pet rabbit (fully 18 months ago) all over again--so I'm trying my best not to think about it. The thief needed to saw through a gigantic lock, then must have had a truck to take it away (the front wheel locks when it's parked so it can't be rolled away without the key), plus friends to help lift it, so the amount of planning makes me sick. We probably won't get another one, because there's nothing to stop it from happening again, and our insurance company probably does not want to keep buying Vespas for thieves. Anyway: not thinking about it, except to remind myself that I'm lucky to have "theft of Vespa while on 2-week trip to Peru" as a problem.]