The home stretch

Whenever I took a plane flight as a child, I would bide my time looking intently out the window in search of any Care Bears that might be frolicking around in the clouds.

Our flight between Miami and Houston seemed like the kind of flight where I might have found one.

If I got to pick which Care Bear I'd encounter, I probably would have gone with Bedtime Bear, to help me get some sleep during the 30+ hours of travel time between Cusco and Minneapolis.

We had to bid farewell to Saul the tour guide at the Cusco airport. I cannot underestimate how great he was. Not only did he put up with me butchering the Spanish language* on a regular basis, he was friendly, informative and patient at all times. And there were definitely a few weirdos in our tour group that would have tested my patience.

Here is Saul with three of those weirdos-

We flew from Cusco to Lima, and then had a layover for a few hours before our 1:00 am flight from Lima to Miami. We landed in Miami shortly before 8:00 am, which left us roughly 10 hours to kill until our Miami to Houston and Houston to Minneapolis flights.

We decided to spend the time hitting a few more of the South Florida sites. First we stopped at Biscayne National Park, America's largest maritime national park (we watched a 20 minute movie that relayed this fact at least three times). Afterwards we drove to Key Largo for a relaxing, idyllic lunch on the patio at a place called Sundowners. I'd share a picture but at this point none of us were in any state to be photographed.

Enjoy these pristine white flowers from outside the Key Lime Cafe instead.

Thankfully the rest of our day was pretty uneventful, and we landed back in Minneapolis safe and sound around midnight.

And with that, another adventure comes to a close. Peru was amazing.

Until my next international incident, thank you to the approximately three people who have read any of this, and happy travels.

*(Warning, NSFW language coming up.) I had a blast speaking Spanish all week and for the most part I was able to communicate very effectively, but it would be delusional to think I didn't make some mistakes. However, I don't think I said anything quite as hilarious as the flight attendant on our Cusco to Lima flight. As we were landing, she made the standard announcement in Spanish, then repeated it in English. Unfortunately for her, that meant the 40 Americans in our group all heard her say, "Be careful opening the overhead bins, as items may have shitted during flight."