Off to Peru

Damien naps in a sublime spot in Shenandoah NP

With the school year being over, and us feeling a lot lighter, we got in the car and drove to Shenandoah National Park to compliment our peaceful state of being and do some more exploring. This was after some extensive celebrating with fellow teachers who every so often would bust out with a passionate rendition of "School's Out for Summer." Damien's department head told him, "Congratulations, you just made it through the hardest year of your life," while the rest ask if we are really really really coming back next year. We assure them that we will not be adding to the high turnover rate of inner city school faculty just yet.


Back to the vacation part! We had reserved a cabin about 1/2 a mile off the Appalachian Trail and right in the middle of the park. We saw lots of deer and one especially clumsy spotted fawn, but the wildlife highlight was certainly creatures who had been fairly elusive to me in the past: bears. We saw 6 bears in 2 days! The first 2 were spotted right off the Doyles River Trail on the way to and from the waterfall you see in the picture. On our second day, we completed an 8-mile hike (sore calves- need more training for our Andean trek!) and saw a huge mama bear and her three cubs right behind our cabin! They went running up the hill and the big one stopped about 75 yards away while the three little ones climbed up to the top of a tree above her. We had binoculars so we could see their baby faces and they were beautiful. Mama was not moving and staring at us. Every so often she would clap her lips together to make this loud noise and we're pretty sure she was telling us not to come any closer. There was a little gnashing of the teeth as well. We admired them for about 20 minutes and were awed by her size. We were ready to run if necessary. We decided to get out of her line of sight so that they could make a move to leave. But we couldn't leave either because that's where we were sleeping and it was around 8:30 pm. So we stayed quiet and out of view and after quite some time we saw them come down and move on. It was incredible!

We found out that mice like licking olive oil too.

There are massive Tulip trees in the park

So now it's packing mania over here. Our flight into Lima is on Tuesday. We're bringing all of our gear for cold mountain weather and a crazy idea that maybe we should go to Bolivia too. Trying to fit all we need into our 2 backpacks. Thank god for zip lock bags.