June 12, 2025
Day 30: Feelings
After sleeping some on our 16 hour bus ride, we awoke around 6:30/7am as the sun was rising and the bus was still heading towards Lima. With the 160 degree seats, sleeping wasn’t terrible but we are still excited to sleep in a bed with clean sheets and take a hot shower tonight! At our first stop in Nazca around 7:30am, we had cereal and canned milk and bananas. Then we did some research on where to stay and what to do in Miraflores for our last few days in Peru. We have to repack the bike into a more durable bike box, but we should hopefully have some down time to eat food, explore and treat ourselves to some much needed R&R.
Around 10:30am, the bus stopped in Ica and then we had the last 4.5 hour leg to Lima. We spent a good portion of the bus ride experiencing bike anxiety. We were trying to see whether our bike would be sent as cargo, how to track it and coming up with contingency plans if it didn’t arrive on time. Unfortunately, the AirTag on our bike still hadn’t moved so we knew it had not left Abancay yet. We kept getting further and further away from it. Megan was spiraling a little bit, worried about what we would do if our bike arrived too close to our flight on Saturday. Towards the end of the bus ride, Megan learned that her Uncle Brendan - the most cheerful, loving, generous, big-hearted person - passed away suddenly today. The news was devastating and shocking and hard to process. We are thinking of the Barker family and all of the people whose lives were better because of Brendan.
Shocked and stressed and teary-eyed, we arrived in Lima at the Cruz del Sur terminal around 3pm, with our bike still in Abancay. We picked up our luggage and went to the ticket counter to investigate our bike situation and plead our case if necessary. It was very hard to get in touch with someone virtually, so the ticket counter was our best bet. Luckily, we found a helpful worker who called the terminal in Abancay. The worker told us our bike was too big to fit as cargo. The bike could possibly fit on the overnight bus out of Abancay tonight, but if it didn’t, it wouldn’t arrive until Monday or Tuesday. No, Megan said. Our flight leaves Saturday night and we need our bicycle by Friday (it was Thursday). Frustrated and concerned, we emphasised as best we could that the bike needed to arrive tomorrow! We have to fly home Saturday and we need the bike with us. The worker made another call and then reassured us the bike would come tomorrow. We had no ticket confirmation or anything, so we had to trust his word for it. After this exchange, we got cappuccinos and sat in the lobby to give Megan some time to call family.
We then took an Uber to our hotel. We arrived and promptly felt culture shock—there were lots of other tourists and the receptionists ask if you speak English or Spanish and you can pay for things in US dollars. After checking in to our lovely hotel room with a king bed(!!), we headed out to buy some cheap clean clothes from a department store—new underwear, socks, and a shirt. We want to treat ourselves to some R&R and we want to spend the rest of our cash before we leave, so we are getting a couples massage on Saturday. As we walked over to the spa to schedule and pay ahead of time, guess what we saw? Bike boxes in good condition, only a few blocks from our hotel! The bike shop employees asked for 100 soles for 2 boxes but we got them down to 80 soles. The location was too convenient to pass up, as we had originally planned to Uber to a Trek store the next day. We scheduled our massage, bought the boxes, picked up a chocolate croissant snack on the way home and headed to shower and change.
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We took hot showers (woohoo!), washed some of our other clothes in the sink and picked a place for dinner. Megan wanted to try ceviche - a classic Peruvian dish! It’s wild being in a big city after spending so much time in remote villages. We like Miraflores so far—there are lots of cute shops, good coffee places, good restaurants and it feels welcoming. Dinner was delicious! Megan even tried a pisco sour—another Peruvian classic! At dinner, we were anxiously awaiting the news of whether our bike made it onboard the overnight bus, which had left moments ago. We decided to wait until the end of dinner to look at the AirTag location. We didn’t want to ruin dinner with bad news. At the end of dinner, we refreshed the AirTag location - the bike had moved from Abancay!! We hope this is a good sign that the bike is on its way to us! After dinner we went and got our first ice cream in a long time - YUM!
We are headed to sleep the cleanest we have been in a long time and so relieved we will be reunited with our tandem tomorrow :)
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I've found that traveling with a bike when I'm not actually riding the bike is a major PITA. Worth it though, right?
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