Travel Firsts

One thing I love about travel is all the firsts. An especially fantastic trip typically has a lot of them. (I even think that’s one of the things that makes a trip especially fantastic.)

For her 18th birthday, instead of wrapping up some trinket she didn’t really need I decided to give my daughter an unforgettable experience instead. So I took her to Peru for a week. (Her friends were all incredibly jealous!)

Among the things that will forever make this trip remarkable is the incredible number of firsts:

• Her first time outside of North America.
• Her first time south of the equator.
• Her first legal drink (she was of legal drinking age in Peru).
• Her first time flying first class. (We got bumped up on one leg of our flight.)

• Her first time having a limo driver waiting for us at the airport with one of those little placards with our name on it. (I did this twice on our trip. Once to see the Panama Canal after normal tourist hours and again to have a driver take us to a beach in Lima.)

• Her first time seeing the Pacific Ocean. (She of course also got to wade around in it.)

Sydney’s first time ever seeing the Pacific Ocean. She got to see it, and even wade around in it, in the southern hemisphere.

• Her first view of the Andes Mountains.

• Her first time seeing an alpaca.

Alpaca roaming freely in Machu Picchu.

• Her first time seeing a chinchilla in the wild. (She has pet chinchillas.)

Wild chinchilla. Machu Picchu, Peru

• Her first time in a railroad dining car.

• Even, weirdly enough, her first time pulling her own luggage off the baggage claim conveyor belt.

• And her first time crashing a wedding.

We sort of crashed an outdoor wedding in Plaza Mayor, Cusco, Peru.

It’s trips like this that are bound to give her the travel bug. I’m glad to be the one who gave it to her and to have been there to share in all those firsts.

We hadn’t even left Peru yet and already we began talking about where to go next. And when.