I finally made it to Machu Picchu!
I had planned to go back in 2016, but that trip got punted in favor of a trip to Serbia instead (which I documented here). No problem, I thought. I’ll schedule it for the next year. That didn’t happen (I went to South Korea, China, Australia, and New Zealand instead). Another 40+ countries and nine years later I finally did the Machu Picchu trip. And threw in the Galapagos Islands as a bonus.
We booked a tour with Road Scholar, a 50-year-old company specializing in educational learning, which was important to us. I’ll have more details later, but here are some highlights of the trip. Joining fourteen others from around the United States, we flew first to Lima, Peru. Touring the city one day, we then flew on to Cusco, only to head out to the Sacred Valley to climb the Ollantaytambo ruins and visit an alpaca/llama/vicuna farm. After a day or so there we headed back to Ollantaytambo to take the famous rail line to Aguas Calientes (aka, Machu Picchu Village), where we spent the night. Taking the treacherous bus ride up to the Machu Picchu gate was worth it. Finally being able to stand in the iconic viewing spot to get a photo of the ancient Incan village was a dream come true. We also got to hike around the village itself and learn from a guide with traditional ancestry.
Eventually we headed back to Cusco for a couple of days, touring the city and going out to the Sacsayhuamen ruins just outside of town. In both Machu Picchu and Sacsayhuamen we got to see the amazing Incan craftmanship, with many-ton blocks of rock placed together so tightly you can’t slip a piece of paper between them. We also got to experience local Peruvian music and hear lectures on Peruvian agriculture (including 4000 varieties of potatoes and corn), Inca and pre-Inca history, and musical instruments. We even had a lesson in making ceviche.
Then it was off to Ecuador with a quick flight from Cusco to Lima and then on to Quito. After touring Quito for a day or so, we hopped on another plane, stopping in Guayaquil to refuel and trade passengers, then out to the Galapagos for the second half of the adventure. This really was two trips in one. The Peru part was all about ancient culture and civilizations. The Galapagos part was all about communing with nature.
In all, we visited eight Galapagos Islands in the middle and eastern part of the archipelago (there is a separate tour for the western islands). We arrived in Baltra, which is mostly airport, then spent time on Santa Cruz, the amazing bird island of Genovesa, Plaza Sur (South Island), Santa Fe, Floreana, Espanola, and San Cristobal. Mostly we were by ourselves on the islands, sometimes overlapping with another tour boat. All tours are limited to no more than 16 passengers to help protect the native flora and fauna. During the week in the Galapagos, we had plenty of opportunity to snorkel with green turtles and sea lions, kayak around the rocky inlets (often with young sea lions frolicking around us), and hiking in the bird-filled environments. There were plenty of blue-footed, red-footed, and Nazca boobies, albatross, and tons of other birds and their babies, not to mention land and marine iguanas, and unique species like lava lizards and lava herons.
It was hard to come home after 17 days on the road (and in the air and on the water), and it didn’t help that I got a bad cold upon my return. But the time spent in both Peru and Ecuador is something I’ll treasure forever.
More stories and photos coming soon.
[All photos by David J. Kent; map adapted from Google maps]
Coming in March 2026: Lincoln in New England: In Search of His Forgotten Tours
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David J. Kent is Immediate Past President of the Lincoln Group of DC and the author of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America and Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America.
His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
There stands a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Hingham, Massachusetts, New England. It’s immediately across the street from the Samuel Lincoln house. In Hingham, England, United Kingdom there is also a statue of Lincoln. But why? And who was Samuel Lincoln?
The statue in Hingham, England is actually a bust, not a full statue. It was created based on the life mask of Leonard Volk made in 1860 just after Lincoln’s nomination. It depicts a much younger, beardless (and shirtless) Lincoln. It sits in an alcove on the side of St. Andrew’s Church. The bust was installed in 1919 to commemorate the Lincoln ancestry that had for many generations worshiped at the St. Andrew parish.
Another connection is to Robert Burns, the Scottish poet whom Lincoln had a particular fascination. Lincoln had supposedly discovered Burns from Jack Kelso, an enigmatic friend from Lincoln’s New Salem days. Kelso had emigrated to the United States from Scotland, where he had previously been a Glasgow schoolteacher. He apparently owned many volumes of Burns that Lincoln read over and over (ditto for Shakespeare). Lincoln was hooked and recited Burns from memory on many occasions through his life. Robert Burns is eminently present in Edinburgh, including a large monument at the foot of Calton Hill (not far from the aforementioned Lincoln statue). Burns is also one of the three Scottish writers featured in the Writers’ Museum tucked into Lady Stair’s Close a few steps off the Royal Mile that leads to the Edinburgh Castle. He is joined there by Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott.
The American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia once had a statue depicting Abraham Lincoln and his son Tad sitting on a park bench. As of this writing it is no longer there, and hasn’t been since 2023. So, where is it?
While at the Valentine I also got to see another “Civil War President.” A statue of Jefferson Davis had stood for many decades along Monument Avenue in Richmond. During the 2020 protests over the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota, the Davis statue was vandalized with paint, then pulled down. That statue now sits – or more accurately, lays – in the Valentine’s main gallery. Pink and yellow paint splatters the bronze, Davis’s head is bashed in from the fall off his pedestal, and his right arm is nearly severed. The display symbolizes the city’s change in attitude over its prior adulation of Confederate figures. All of its many dozens of Confederate statues have now been removed, with the exception of a few remaining on the grounds of the Viriginia State Capitol (you walk past them as you proceed from the equestrian statue of George Washington to the Governor’s Mansion). They are now joined by two large group statues, one featuring the many women who fought for voting rights and the other of Barbara Johns and others who fought the battle that would become Brown v. Board of Education. Johns is scheduled to replace Robert E. Lee in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall. Interestingly, it was Edward Virginius Valentine who had sculpted both the Lee statue (now removed from the hall and currently at Richmond’s Museum of History and Culture) and the one of Davis now at the Valentine Museum. Hopefully, Johns will make it into Statuary Hall soon, perhaps after the new governor takes off after this fall’s election.
Abraham Lincoln is best known as the sixteenth President of the United States, long before the POTUS acronym was invented. He was elected in November 1860 and by the time he was inaugurated in March 1861, seven southern states had seceded, with four more joining them just over a month later after the new Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter. But this wasn’t the first time Lincoln had been put forward for executive office. In 1856 he was nominated by his fellow new Republican Party members for Vice President after the party had nominated John C. Fremont for President.
On June 11, 1848, congressman Abraham Lincoln arrived back in Washington, D.C. after having traveled all night from Philadelphia, where he attended the Whig National Convention that nominated Zachary Taylor for president. Upon his return he finds a letter from his wife Mary, who has been visiting her family in Kentucky for several months. These two events begin a campaign and a mystery.
A major auction of Abraham Lincoln artifacts held May 21, 2025, brought in nearly $8 million dollars. The largest amount for any single item was over $1.5 million (including auction fees) for a pair of blood-stained gloves that Lincoln wore the night of the assassination.
