What a great place. After arriving in Cusco a few days earlier, we met our friends who came all the way from Virginia to see Machu Picchu with us. It had been 6 months since the kids had seen Drew and Avery and they were just about to go crazy waiting for the day they arrived. We took a 3 hour train ride to the valley below Machu Picchu, then took a bus up the narrow dirt road to where we met our guide. It’s hard to describe how cool this place is. It was built by the Incas about 600 years ago (around 1450), then abandoned after about 100 years. Nobody really knows what the significance of this site is. Some think it was built as a royal retreat, or maybe to honor a sacred landscape, or for human sacrifice, or it was used as a university, or that maybe aliens built it (I think that theory is the least likely). Whatever it was used for, it was an amazing feat of building. Machu Picchu is on the top of an 8,000 foot tall mountain (actually 3,000 feet lower than Cusco where we are staying) and made of carved granite stone from a quarry right on the site. It has countless terraces for stabilizing the city as well as for growing crops and preventing erosion. It was especially unique as it is the only ancient site we have seen that wasn’t plundered or destroyed by enemy forces – the Spanish never found this place (as best as anyone can tell).