At least it was hell for Gisele and her friend Eli. The rest of us had fun.<\/p>\n
We had been led to believe that the ride down the mountain would be on a paved road, with the van following us to pick up anybody who got tired. It turned out to be quite different.<\/p>\n
We got on our bicycles (nice mountain bikes, by the way) at an altitude of 13,700 feet and started down a steep, rocky narrow mountain bike trail. The ladies would have turned back right then, but the guide told us that it got easier after a little way. <\/p>\n
It didn’t. We descended almost 3000 feet over a steep jumble of rocks most of the way. Gisele walked her bike about 1\/2 the time, and I walked it (and mine) about 1\/2 of the time, and she rode it the rest of the time.<\/p>\n
The kids and the men had a great time, and all agreed that the scenery was wonderful. Snow-capped 16,000+ foot peaks covered almost 180 degrees of the horizon as we descended first through tundra, then forest, then farms. We occasionally had to dodge donkeys, pigs and kids in the path, but the chickens, sheep and dogs pretty much stayed out of the way.<\/p>\n
At the bottom we followed a road for about a mile, and Gisele and Eli found a station-wagon taxi that took them and their bikes that last mile. Gisele’s leg was cramping, her butt hurt and she was tired. She now says she’s glad she did it, but she’s also very glad the experience is behind her.<\/p>\n
Tomorrow it’s an 8-hour bus ride back to Lima for 3 days rest before we fly home. I hope our flight home isn’t delayed 6 hours like Devon’s was!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At least it was hell for Gisele and her friend Eli. The rest of us had fun. We had been led to believe that the ride down the mountain would be on a paved road, with the van following us to pick up anybody who got tired. It turned out to be quite different. We […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family-updates"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}