Ah... Ahhhh.... Ahhhhhh.... Machu Picchu!

Yes, we're heading to Machu Picchu (and Peru in general) in May! 

And what's really exciting is...  My sister is coming, too!!  We travel a fair bit with a good friend of EDP's and a while back, EDP mentioned to him that we were looking at heading to Machu Picchu soon.  There are already a lot of restrictions on visitors to the site - the high number of tourists plus things like earthquakes and landslides are a threat to Machu Picchu.  A few years back, the government introduced limits of only 2,500 tourists per day with only 400 permits issued for Huayna Picchu and 500 for the Inca Trail.  There's a concern that they may need to shut the site down to tourism entirely so we wanted to make sure we got there before that happened.  Anyway, it was something that EDP's friend wanted to see so he asked to come along.  Since he has a wedding this fall, we decided to plan a trip for the spring.  

Around Christmas, we started looking into things - we decided we wanted to hike part of the Inca Trail so I started looking into tour operators to book with.  Well, things were booking up so we jumped on booking a 2D/1N trek that lets us hike the last 10km of the Inca Trail and then spend at day at Machu Picchu, including hiking up Huayna Picchu.  While we were working on this, I texted my sister to see if she wanted to come and after giving her a full 24 hours to decide, she said she was in!  So now, the four of us are heading to Peru in May.  

As the official Tour Director, I'm still working on the itinerary and I figure I probably should share it with my travel mates before the rest of the world but it's shaping up to be a pretty good trip!