Mark waits at MSP
Waiting for the first of the three legs of our flight, from Minneapolis
to Chicago. (Don’t forget that the orangey color of the border, in
contrast to the usual brown, says that you can get a close-up
by mousing within the frame.)

Monday, 13 April, day zero, when we travel

Saint Paul–Chicago–Houston–Lima

I set my alarm on this travel day for our usual waking time of about 0530, so that we could be picked up at 0700 by the cab to take us the few miles to the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport. When you travel outside the country, you’re supposed to be there three hours before your first flight, not two. Clearly this means a lot of waiting. I took the picture above at 0825, and we still had a lot of sitting before us. Or is that behind us?

Not much to be said about the whole trip MSP/ORD/IAH/LIM except that on the Chicago-to-Houston leg, I managed to spill a mostly-full glass of red wine onto my pants. And wasn’t I glad that I had worn the black ones and not the white!

For the most part, there are not a lot of opportunities for pho­tog­raphy when you’re traveling. At the beginning of the trip from Houston to Lima, though, I used the panorama function of the iPhone’s camera to show the view from my seat in the plane. As frequently happens, the motion of something during the process may cause distortions: in this case, Mark’s arm.

panorama of airplane interior

In due course, we arrived in Lima, and were met by a representative of Metropolitan Touring, the Peruvian partner of AdventureSmith; they would baby us most pleasingly throughout the trip, and at this late hour of night, we were more than happy to be babied. They took us to our hotel and made sure that we were well registered, and told us they’d pick us up in the afternoon of the next day, which promised to be most eventful. Read all about it.