Dinner our first night in Washington DC was like a high end bar mitzvah without any kids, plates of fancy hotel surf and turf and a few toasts and smattering applause around the room. I sat at table next to a techie couple from SF who told their ‘cute meet’ story – one in which he thought he was interviewing her for a job,  but she thought they were on a date. Post dinner she suggested they get some gelato, and that was his ‘ah ha’ moment, because no one talks business over gelato.

Most of the other travelers are casual and friendly and tiny bit awkward which is sort of my comfort zone.

We get little sleep. (Hard to complain about jet lag after meeting couple who came all the way from Maui)  After a painfully early buffet breakfast, we board a bus to airport and our fancy private jet.

The captain and crew (all ridiculously good looking) and the chef (whose name is Graham and who is wearing a toque and pronounces spongecake spoonge-kek) greet us with great enthusiasm and Jeeves-ish British accents. The jet is plush. Each guest gets a bag of amenities in their own dedicated storage bin: a pillow, slippers, Occitane toiletries, hat, pashmina, down comforter, Bose headphones.



Post takeoff the experience goes full Robin Leach with a snack of champagne (wishes) and caviar (dreams!)


then it was time for our first inflight iPad lecture about the architecture of the Incas.

If you are into Incans you already know this stuff, but as past civilizations go, they were pretty impressive builders, although even with all their technological know-how, they never figured out how to build an arch. Therefore, even a plebeian like myself can wander their historic sites and know which was built by the Incans and which was built by the conquering Spanish who waltzed in, slaughtered the men, and stole the women.(because the Incans also never figured out how to build muskets)

A lot of the lecture is ‘extrapolating’ aka guesswork because Incans had no written language. Although they did have a sort of communication through knotted yarn that apparently no one knows how to read. More or less as if this blog had to interpreted through the snarled knots of electrical wires and cords currently in my carry-on.

We’re served fancy lunch; lemon olive oil poached red lobster with spiced mango salsa, grilled swordfish with peas and garlic, char grilled capsicums (red peppers) and roasted butternut squash.


I receive four hot hand towels during flight. I get that they are very into hand washing germ phobia here, but seriously – how filthy can we possibly get sitting on a plane for 7 hours?

At one point we flew over the Panama Canal.

(It’s the brown smear lower left).

We disembark and then it’s the icky part, customs, bus ride through grey, grim parts of Lima. Thirty percent of Peru lives in this overcrowded city, and traffic is so bad that later this week when the IMF meets there,  they’ve declared an official holiday in order to make the streets passable.

We go to the Larco Herrera museum where we see cool things like this ornamental beak

and this mummy.



There was also an “erotic” section of the museum where we saw stuff like this –



and Kevin and I giggled like the immature, puritanical, American children we are.