One of my main goals before we left our apartment in Huanchaco was to finally get caught up on our perpetually lolly-gagging blog. Well... needless to say that didn't happen. In fact our blog is now hitting an almost laughable 4-month delay compared to real-time. To all my faithful readers I apologize!

If you are interested in receiving real-time updates then you should check out our facebook page at http://facebook.com/homeonthehighway

Life continued pretty normally in Huanchaco, hanging out with our buds, working, drinking beers, and watching sunsets. We really love our lives here in Huanchaco but we were starting to feel that itch to get back on the road. We finally made the decision to tell our landlord that November would be our last month in the apartment.

Just a few weeks before our departure date we got some more visitors. Jed and Megan from Adventure Americas are fellow Americans who drove their Toyota Tacoma with a Phoenix Pop-up camper all the way from Wyoming down to Peru. They too are headed to Ushaia. When they showed up to the house with 8 liters of beer and a box of wine, we knew we would soon be becoming best friends.


We hung around the house a few days cooking, grubbing, and getting to know each other.


One night we let it slip that we had not been camping in over 4 weeks. Fearing that they were hanging out with a bunch of sissy housecats the plan was made to go camping the next night. We jumped on Google Earth and found some nice 4x4 desert roads from Huanchaco that led out to a canyon that looked great for camping.

We headed out the next morning.



Having a little fun in the soft desert sands


Along the way we picked up two of Jed and Megans friends from Austrailia. The Australians flew to California, purchased two KLR 650's and headed south. We all agree they are much more hardcore than we are.



We eventually found the perfect spot and setup camp.




Many beers were drank, bullshit road stories swapped, and good times had by all around the fire that night.


The next day was Thanksgiving. Them being Aussies and all; our friends had no idea what lie in store for them when we invited them to a good ol' fashion USA Thanksgiving feast.

The next day we headed up to the store to try to find a turkey. Interestingly enough... Peruvians don't celebrate Thanksgiving so it was harder to track down a Turkey than we thought. We eventually manage to find a breast and some legs. We combined the pieces into a Frankenstein turkey with 6 legs, since thats everyone's favorite part anyway. We also bought all the fixin's we could find corn, sweet potatoes, green beans, butter, etc etc. We got home and hit the kitchen.




Our Australian friends wondering where all the butter keeps going, as I run to the store for the 3rd time to buy MORE. Oh if they only knew...


Stuffing, Green Bean Casserole, Sweet potato pie.


Not pictured is the turkey, but here is the aftermath of our feast. The Aussies said they had never eaten that much food in their lives.



In the morning we waved goodbye to Adventure the Americas and started packing up the house. It took us a grand total of 1.5 hours to relocate our entire lives back into the truck. Definitely a nice perk of traveling light.


People have been asking ask what will happen to our newly found kitten Squeakers? Well... We tried taking him out with us a few times on the road but between him throwing endless squeel fests, being scared crapless, and jumping out the window of the moving 4runner we decided he might not be fit for the hard life on the road. Lauren still wanted to take him but she agreed it wouldn't be fair to drag along the cat if it was not interested in this overlanding life of ours. It was a difficult decision to leave the little dude behind, but after the hellish week you will read about in our next post we were convinced we made the right decision.


Goodbye Huanchaco. We hope to return someday.



Next we head back to the Ecuadorian border yet again to renew our vehicle permits and then off to Lima to do some dog-sitting for our buddies at SprinterLife. We gave ourselves 6-days to complete this 3-day trip. Plenty of time right!?

Wrong...