Yesterday was such an epic day in the Andes. The night before we were told that there was a protest for some cause and so a group took down a bridge on our route to Llata. This turned the normally three hour drive into seven hours over multiple mountain passes, awesome. This also meant that we would not make our morning school visit, so we could only hope that they would wait for us.

What happened when we arrived is something that I could never fully describe with words. We stopped at the entrance to Llata and met up with the local officials. After some hand shakes, hugs, fireworks and pictures with them all a boy holding a torch, like the Olympic one, led us through town. We were then met by a large marching band that followed us the rest of the way. The whole town was out in full force. Signs everywhere with our names and pictures of random cyclists.  We must have walked by thousands of people, it was really unreal. They were so happy to have us there. One guy even came up and grabbed me, picked me up and gave me a huge bear hug. He was almost in tears!

Once the parade concluded we moved on to the school. The kids had stayed an extra two hours to see us. We played a few games with one group in their town’s stadium and then visited many of the class rooms to see what all they were learning by working with Right To Play.  We closed out our visit with lunch with all of the teachers followed by some speeches and several dances. The feeling I got was that they didn’t want us to ever leave, but we had to. We had another five hours in the bus to get back to Huaraz.