After our adventures in the mountains, it was back to the coast for sand and cities. And we kinda fell in love with the trucks in Peru. I mean, how can you not smile at this wild mop top rolling down the street? This one has been dubbed the Jon Bon Jovi, circa 1985. The David Lee Roth 1988. We tucked ourselves into a small deserted rv park on the edge of the lagoon just north of Lima. The avian
Ronda Kaysen of the New York Times profiled us along with several other worldschooling families in her recent article titled The New Nomads: Have Wifi, Will Travel published on April 15, 2018. Naturally we were thrilled to talk about our adventure, including the trials of living in a 70 square foot camper and our hopes for returning to Seattle. We talked with Ronda back in December 2017; since that time we’ve completed our 20,000 mile road trip from Seattle to
Back in 2012, when our son Ben was 20 months old (and Emma had not yet made her appearance in the world) we traveled to Peru for two weeks. It was Ben’s first international trip and our introductory visit to South America. It was a great experience: we visited Arequipa, Lake Titicaca, Cusco, the Sacred Valley, and of course, Machu Picchu. In November 2017, when we were roaring through Peru, we elected to bypass the places we’d visited previously, choosing
The mountains are calling and we must go. We took a sharp swerve to the east to hit up some of Peru’s most stunningly gorgeous peaks. In Spanish Cordillera Blanca means ‘white range’, although they are still technically part of the Andes chain of mountains that snakes south; the continent’s crooked spine. They also serve as the continental divide. Weirdly, I expect divides to be in the middle of the continent: neatly packaging and sending their watery volumes into equal parts
Hullo Peru! After a long border crossing from Ecuador we tucked ourselves into a little campspot on the beach for a few days to regroup. The kids make good beach bums. Also! We had our first encounter with Peru’s famous hairless dogs. Not to be confused with Mexican hairless dogs. Peru’s specimens were bred by pre-Incan cultures along the coastal regions but almost became extinct when the Spaniards arrived. They are…weird. These guys weren’t completely hairless and had mottled skin
Full disclosure: Mocoa isn’t really southern Colombia. If you have yourself a look at a map of the country, you’ll see that about half of Colombia, including the southeastern-most swath, is the vast roadless wilderness inhabited by the Amazon Jungle. My apologies, dear readers, I’m feeling a bit lazy this morning so the title will stay, despite perhaps not being entirely geographically accurate. Regardless of its placement, Mocoa is down near the border with Ecuador in a remote part of
Time to hit the dirt! The highway debacle outside of Ibague sent us scurrying for roads that were more lightly traveled. So we headed for a desert that isn’t technically a desert and at various times over the millennia has been a tropical rain forest, a prairie grassland, and several hundred feet underwater. For our two days in the area, it was blisteringly hot with occasional clouds and rain(!), which turned everything a bit swampy. For the record, one of
We rolled into a hostel in the sweet little town of Salento. It was pouring buckets and the camping area was about 6″ deep in standing water. Dude, we are from SEATTLE; this doesn’t bother us in the slightest. We popped the top of the camper and the kids happily played with legos while we tried to eek out a wifi signal. Chris also took the shortest shower in the history of mankind because the temp started out hot and
On this trip we really haven’t given big cities a fair shake. We tend to roll up to the outskirts, take the briefest of peeks into the urban center, and then promptly get the heck out of dodge. We have missed countless museums, fabulous restaurants, and delightful shopping. Example A: Medellin, Colombia. We had a slightly terrifying drive up to the campground though the city (Google Maps is not our friend – we should have listened to Garmin), tried
It seems like just yesterday I did out last budget post but alas, we’ve managed to make our way through another five countries over the past two months. We are still running well below our budget of $200/day. Over the past two months, we’ve had a few major expenses as well, shipping the truck from Panama to Colombia (required to get around the Darien Gap) and a trip into the Amazon jungle in Ecuador. From a fuel perspective, we saw