Perú - Our first big family trip

Lima Airport
It was one of those bucket list trips I've had since I saw the show "In Search Of..." where they showed the Nazca lines. I was always attracted by the mystery behind all these wonderful places and usually let my mind wander as a child. So when I learned of the really cheap flights Avianca was offering I immediately booked 3 tickets!
This is very unusual for us, we like to plan things well in advanced and make doubly sure of everything, but for this trip we just bought the tickets and sorted it out later.
As a family we'd already traveled to Guatemala, but that trip was wholly planned by my father-in-law seeing that he lives there and knows his way around. For Perú, it was completely up to us.
This is when I was introduced to all the wonderful cheap hotel sites out there, especially Hotels Combined and Booking.com. I managed to score very good prices at locations that couldn't be beat.
We are not typical travelers, we like to enjoy local customs and we have a desire for adventure, so those were key things in our trip. Sadly due to time/budget constraint we couldn't actually go to Nazca, but we sure had a great time in all the other archaeological sites.
This was our plan. 
Our trip highlights were Cusco, Ollantaytambo, Machu Picchu and Lima
The idea behind this view is to have a simple plan for each day (sights/transit/food), have easy access to the hotel information for that day and a budget for each day. For this case I had lunch, dinner, flights, hotels and tours). On the top left box I summarized the trip's budget. I actually created a simple 7-day template, you can download the pdf here. If you need help filling it out drop me a comment and I'll be happy to assist :)
We basically sat down as a family, shared each of our would like to's and fitted them in our planner. it actually took about 7 or 8 of these sheets to get to the final version, but we had a plan where we could all enjoy the trip and make the most of our time.
In upcoming posts I'll detail each of the cities we visited with our activities - I hope it inspires you too!

Booking.com

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