Dawn was still far away when my phone alarm went off. I leapt out of my single sized bed on the sleeping porch and strode across the room to turn off my secondary alarm. It was my first time using that phone to wake me up so I wanted to be sure nothing impeded the long air journey before me. In about 24 hours, I would be waking up in another Pacific coast town on another hemisphere.

It was the day of my trip from the US to Peru. My Aunt Carol had asked me to wake her five minutes before we had to leave so that she could splash some water on her face before driving me to the bus station. It was to be a day of transfers using multiple modes of transportation, and the first leg would begin in California with a bus trip from Santa Cruz to San Jose.

I started a pot of water for my tea and went to brush my teeth. I’d decided to shave and shower the night before, prolonging just a bit the hour at which I had to wake. With my oral hygiene completed, I went to my room and packed the last of the things into my backpack and knocked on my Aunt’s door as I headed back to the kitchen.

She said she was already up, which was not unusual. My aunt is usually up by four every morning, and it is well established that if the light in her kitchen is on, you are welcome to come in for some hot coffee, a ritual she enjoys daily while reading the morning paper.

There’d be no time for reading the paper this morning as we had to leave the house at quarter past four to get me to the station for my bus due to depart 25 minutes later. She’d offered to drive me the whole way to the airport, but I declined because I didn’t want her to make the round trip when there was already a bus heading over the hill in time for me to catch my flight. She didn’t fight me on it and confided, as we were driving to the station, that she’d be back in bed before I got to the airport.

The San Francisco bay area has one of the best interconnected transportation systems in the US. You can go from San Francisco to Monterey, a distance of 120 miles, using only local buses. There are a few transfers, but the buses are timed to meet each other as you daisy chain your way along the Pacific Ocean. Since you don’t have to worry about navigating the serpentine curves that follow the edge of the north American continent along the famous Highway 1, you can sit back and enjoy the majestic views.

That trip, however, is for one with the luxury of time, and I had a flight to catch so I boarded the Highway 17 express which has its own serpentine route to follow as it winds up and over the Santa Cruz mountains before descending into San Jose. The trip costs $7, and you have to have exact change. I find it somewhat ironic that there is no electronic way to pay for a bus that services the workers of Silicon valley, especially since the bus itself is configured for WiFi throughout the trip.

Using that connectivity, I completed some research on my initial destination, downloading local maps of Lima, my electronic boarding pass, and hostel information just in case I had no internet connectivity upon arrival, something entirely likely. It wasn’t necessarily a fair assumption. So far, I’d already been impressed that I was able to purchase and download a bus pass for transportation from the airport to the Miraflores neighborhood of Lima. The ticket was valid for any time in the next year, and I simply had to show the pass on my phone when boarding.

South America was already sounding as sophisticated as destinations I’d visited in Europe. It’s one of the reasons I’d decided to go on this trip. After having visited 45 countries, I still find Mexico to be my favorite for spending extended periods of time or even retirement. I find Mexicans to be the most kind and welcoming of any people I’ve met. Combine that with stunning geographic diversity and year-round 70 degree temperature, and it’s a no brainer.

What Mexico has lacked historically for me is technological sophistication and developed recreational options. Everything must be paid for in cash, and hiking trails are almost non-existent. In fact, there’s not even really a word for “hiking trail” in Mexico. They call it a “camino”, which simply means “road” differentiated in no way from a four lane artery through the city center.

I had been curious to see whether I’d find South. America to be a more sophisticated version of Mexico yet retained the benevolent values of Latino culture. Though Lima airport had no metro service, it did have a bus service to take you downtown with tickets you could download to a phone, ironically more sophisticated than the method of feeding dollar bills into a machine which I’d just used.

The Highway 17 express arrived at Diridon station in San Jose which is one of the most multimodal stations I’ve ever been to. From there you can take Amtrak to Seattle or Los Angeles, Caltrain between San Jose and San Francisco, the Ace train to the central California valley, or many of the regional buses that serve the Silicon valley. Even Greyhound and Trailways share this station. That is a model for how public transportation centers should work.

The one peculiarity is that the free bus that takes you to the San Jose airport only picks up at the next train station down the line. I can’t imagine any reason for this, particularly because the distance from either station to the airport is the same. All I can come up with is that they needed to make some money getting you to and from the airport, so I bought my train ticket and carefully boarded the train. I knew there were express trains during the morning commute, and I didn’t want to accidentally board the non-stop to San Francisco!

For anyone using this as a tool to get from Santa Cruz to the San Jose airport, it should be noted that the transfer from the train station to the airport can be done entirely free of charge. The DASH bus is a free bus service from Diridon station to downtown San Jose. From there, you can catch a free bus to the airport. I was pretty sure that service wouldn’t be running when I arrived since it was designed to get shoppers and museum goers to downtown from the station, and it was still well before opening hours for both.

The train trip took five minutes, and when I arrived at the station, the free airport bus was waiting. I got on board and connected to the bus Wifi for my short trip to the airport. I’d cancelled my phone plan before leaving the US for several months so Wifi was my only option for contact with the world.

I didn’t know how big San Jose airport was, so when the automated message declared we were approaching terminal A, I had to scramble to look up from which terminal my plane was scheduled to depart. I couldn’t find it nor was I able to read the signs outside because it was still dark. The interior of the bus was brightly lit, and the only thing I was able to see was the concerned look of my reflection in the window. Fortunately, an announcement followed stating all the airlines that serviced terminal A. For further assistance, the airline names also scrolled across the red LED marquee at the front of the bus.

Getting off at terminal B, I headed to the check-in desk for Alaska airlines. Having no baggage to check, I simply collected my boarding pass and headed for the gate. Signing up for Global entry was one of the best investments I’ve made. After completing an application and a short in-person interview, you can get a card that allows you to bypass US Customs on your return from international destinations, something that, at times, has saved me hours. As an added bonus, Global entry card holders also receive TSA pre-check status, which allows you to shortcut the line at the security checkpoint when heading for outbound flights.

The expedited process theoretically means that I can arrive at the airport a little closer to my departure time, but I haven’t yet taken advantage of that as early door closings have become the norm on flights. With universal internet connectivity at airports now, waiting at the airport is hardly different from sitting at home with a cup of coffee and working my my computer. I spent the extra two hours updating my credit card travel notifications and reading about Peru.

The first of my three leg flight to Peru took me to Seattle. This is ironic because, not only is it the opposite direction from where I was ultimately headed, I had just flown from Seattle the previous week for an annual gathering to celebrate the life of my Grandmother.

She passed away four years ago, and I am always out of the country on her birthday when the celebration occurs. This year, however, I decided to postpone my international travel by a week so that I could attend the gathering and to see her sister, Aunt Carol, who I hadn’t visited in over a year.

Visits with Aunt Carol are a regular part of my annual migration from Portland to the outside world, and she’s often the last family member I see before departing our shores. Her interest in my travel and my interest in her cooking is what led to this tradition, and I was glad to make it a part of my Grandma’s celebration.

Originally, I had booked my flight to Peru for Sunday evening, figuring I could catch a ride to San Jose from one of my family members on their way home, but my airline changed the flight departure twice. By the second time, it left so early Sunday morning that I would have missed the Grandma get together, so I called Alaska to work out a more agreeable itinerary.

I have never paid for an international flight as I always use miles accumulated through spending points on my Visa card each year. The down side of awards travel is that there are only a limited number of seats available on each flight, so once those are filled, you cannot book award travel on that flight. To his credit, the Alaska awards agent worked for 30 minutes to get me an itinerary that would remain free for me, and that’s how I ended up flying through Seattle on my way to Peru. The layover was only an hour and a half, and in no time I was on my way to Dallas for a red eye to Lima.

I had a couple of interesting experiences on the Dallas flight. The flight attendant made her way down the aisle and asked me if I wanted anything to drink. Out of habit, I ordered a glass of red wine, and she told me it would be $7.50. I replied that I thought wine was complimentary on Alaska airlines. She corrected me saying that complimentary wine was only offered on their partner Horizon air, but she offered to give me a taste anyway. As she handed me a full cup of wine she said, “buy someone a coffee later”.

The second was an interaction I had with the man sitting next to me as we got ready to disembark. It had been one of those times where you spend an entire flight pretending there is not someone sitting right next to you. It reminded me of riding a crowded bus. You stand with your face in someone’s armpit or with your body awkwardly making contact with a stranger of the opposite sex in a way that would be completely inappropriate under any other circumstance.

Here we’d spent three hours not uttering a single word, when the boredom of waiting for people to get off plane prompted him to ask where I was going. I told him Peru, and he answered, “I have no desire to leave this country”. While I applaud his being satisfied with his life as is, I did share with him that my father had once uttered similar words. That was before he was forced to go to Europe to attend my sister’s wedding to a Frenchman. I shared that after my dad returned he said he loved it and wanted to return regularly.

I suggested to the guy that he at least try Italy before ruling out the rest of the world, and he confided that his wife would be really pleased to hear that since she’d been trying to get him to go to Venice. I’m not sure it he’ll ever leave the country, but I can only hope that hearing my father’s experience, he may be just a little more open to it. I stepped off the plane and headed to my next gate for the final leg to Lima.

While waiting for my Lima flight, I heard a series of odd announcements over the public address system most notably, “Michael J Fox, please return to the security checkpoint for a lost item.” Knowing that memory loss is part of late stage Parkinson’s, I could only assume I was in a South Park episode. I couldn’t imagine how this message could have been generated through the official TSA paging system.

The exotic nature of my trip began to take hold when flight announcements were made in both Spanish and English. I was pleased that I continued to retain my Spanish comprehension from high school Spanish classes and recently watching the first three seasons of Narcos on Netflix.

In total, I went to four different high schools, and I ended up having instructors from a variety of Spanish speaking countries which led to my understanding of a variety of colloquialisms. I wouldn’t have known otherwise. As an example, in Spain, one can “coger”, meaning “to catch” the bus. To tell someone in Mexico that you planned to “coger” the bus would probably elicit a response of, “Then be sure to wear a condom.”

My flight to Peru felt like going back in time to the 80s. While there wasn’t a smoking section in the back of the plane, the only video screens were overhead running down the center aisles so everyone got the same movie. I had already downloaded a few of my favorite Netflix series to my phone so I had no need for the headphones that were handed out, though I was curious as to whether they were of the same plastic elastic type that transmitted sound through the empty airspace of the tubes. I remember figuring out you could avoid paying for those headsets if you turned up the volume really loud and pushed up the arm rest so that it was close to your ear.

The food served left a lot to be desired. I guess I’d been spoiled by those top notch foreign air carriers like Emirates that serve warm exoric foods; nothing like the remarkably dry sandwiches served in plastic wrap. To add to the insult, they slice the tomatoes so thin, there’s no moisture left to assist you in swallowing the chewy dough ball in your mouth.

I slept surprisingly well for the first time on an overnight flight. Getting up at 4am probably helped, and I was exhausted even before boarding. I put in my ear plugs and draped myself in a blanket, seat belt fastened on the outside so I wouldn’t be disturbed by the flight attendants when if we met with turbulence.

We landed in Lima just after dawn flying south along the Pacific coast, and I couldn’t help but think of my aunt 5000 miles away reading her paper and enjoying her coffee as the same rays of sun outside my window allowed her to switch off the kitchen light.