MP -- Day Two

Don't worry, this day will be a lot shorter than yesterday's. We didn't get nearly as many pictures, partly because of the dense cloud cover and mostly because we were all dopey from having just gotten engaged.

We got up at 4 am after about 2 hours of sleep, thanks to Mayor McQueso, but we were excited to get back up to MP so the groggy factor was pretty minimal. Actually, Chris says he was just about crapping his pants, but that's mostly because he was about T-minus 30 minutes to proposing.

We caught the first bus up the mountain at 0530 ("What does the '0' stand for? Oh my God, it's early." Still funny after all these years) and were kind of surprised that visibility was crap. I mean, we shouldn't have been surprised -- we were at like 8,000 feet in a rainforest -- but you know how it is. None of the pictures you see of Machu Picchu are ever foggy. It's the same reasoning that catches people off guard when they visit Los Angeles for the first time and are surprised that they can't see the mountains that are always clearly visible on the postcard.

Once on-site, Chris wanted to climb up to the top of the terracing where we had started our wanderings the day before, but I wouldn't let go of the concept that the view wouldn't be any better up there than it was where we were standing. Fortunately, this small change in plans didn't freak him out too much -- he was able to pull out my ring just fine where we were standing. We took a picture of the happy event, and quickly realized that no one would be able to tell where in the world we were, so we returned a few hours later and recreated the scene.

The "real" picture:

The "hey look at us we're at Machu Picchu" picture:

I think they are both nice. For the next couple hours, we wandered around while Chris told me all the stories of how it takes a village to propose at Machu Picchu. Everyone was involved, apparently. Finally, we found ourselves in a random building in Conjunto 17 and started to get curious about what it was used for, so we pulled the book back out and resumed our educational vacation.

Check this out. Real live leaf-cutter ants! Proof we were, in fact, in the jungle. So cool. I just looked down and there they were! I am such a nerd!

Grand staircases were not too good for the Incans. Look how they incorporated the existing rock on both the left and right.

Don't look, Erica. Here's a view down the terraces to the Urubamba river far, far below.