Our stay in Huaraz has now exceeded a month, which is more than twice as long as we originally intended. And while I won’t say that we’re glad that Rett’s bike crash forced us to stay here longer, we’re at least glad that this was the place where we spent that extra time. It’s really helped to give us that “huh, we’re living in Peru” feeling that we’re occasionally able to embody in our otherwise-transient lifestyle. With our regular trips to the grocery stores and the market, they become more familiar, we recognize the dogs we pass on the street, we observe the progress on the many significant construction projects around town, and we’ve even been drawn back to the same restaurants multiple times. And unlike other places where we’ve spent a couple weeks or a month, we didn’t just stay holed up inside our AirBNB (as nice and comfortable as it was!)

So we stayed busy for our final week. We got back to some bike training, repeating rides we’d done earlier. First up was our third ride up PE-14A to Pitec. I was proud of Rett for suppressing her understandable fears and returning to the scene of her crash.

A couple days later, for our final training ride, we repeated our very first Huaraz day ride, up to Rataquenua and Puka Ventana. While our ride to Pitec was disappointingly (yet understandably) slower than our previous attempt, our ride to Rataquenua was significantly faster than our first one. Mostly it was proof that we have become much more acclimated to the altitude, since we almost never needed to stop to catch our breath this time.

In between those rides, we went on a quest through the city to find a pair of leggings to replace Rett’s Lululemons, torn in the crash. We found a couple possibilities, but in the end she decided to just have me stitch the holes closed. It did mean that we finally made it far enough north in the city to check out the riverwalk.

On another day, we got a surprise visit from Eva, our AirBNB hostess (and far more than that title implies!) She had more of her wonderful eggs for us, but then a gift even greater! She had met Lamby during Rett’s injury, and immediately understood “our daughter’s” role (the AirBNB is cozily decorated with numerous dolls, figurines, and stuffed animals, after all). Her and Lamby might have even had a secret chat on her once-a-week bedding/towel change that she does while we’re out. The upshot is that Eva gave us a “Huaracina Lamby”, a stuffed Peruvian lamb for us to remember our stay in Huaraz by.

Not only was it an incredibly thoughtful gift (and obviously the first gift we’ve ever gotten from an AirBNB host!), it was especially touching because it again gave us the feeling that Rett’s mom was reaching her daughter through the vessel of this wonderful Peruvian woman. Because not everyone “gets” why a couple of 40-somethings are attached to stuffed animals (understandably!) But Rett’s mom would have understood Lamby, and Eva does too.

But this left us with a problem: we simply don’t have space to carry two stuffed lambs through South America. The obvious solution was to mail her to one of our (equally-wonderful) package-receiving relatives. But given our abject failure in receiving something shipped to Peru (new leggings from Lululemon), would we have any more luck shipping something from Peru?

It sounded like it was possible, if super-slow (no problem in this case!) to use Serpost, the national postal system. But getting packaging, and understanding the rules and procedures, was likely to be a real problem, so I was prepared for an hours-long slog.

Instead, upon walking into the post office, we were immediately greeted with the smiling face of the polar-opposite of a US Postal Service worker. It might have helped that we showed her Evita’s cuteness, because she then quickly went to the back and found a used box for us to pack her in (which really didn’t seem like standard procedure). Then all throughout the complex process (involving passports, thumbprints, and photos), we had a wonderful conversation, entirely in Spanish, about the friendliness of Peruvians, our travels, and more. So a task that could easily have been a stressful (or impossible!) slog for us ignorant Americans, instead turned out to be a positive and memorable experience all in itself. Eva’s gift just keeps on giving!

Throughout these excursions we continued eating well: collecting more hand-trimned salmon to cook at home from yet another friendly, helpful, and gringo-accomodating vendor at the market, making a third lunch stop at Trivio Restobar with their draft Sierra Andina beers, and finally, on our last night, returning to Ancestral, confirming that our first visit wasn’t just a fluke, and it is genuinely one of the best restaurants we’ve  visited in any country.