The Month Of Machu Picchu: June 2025 Recap

Half of 2025 is over, time has no meaning and I’m refusing to think about it 🙂 . June was a wild month filled with adventure, books, birds and some unfortunate sicknesses, but overall it was filled with a lot of love and laughter. So let’s see what I got up to in June.

I Went To Perú🇵🇪!

I spent half the month in Perú. My Mom had a lifelong goal of seeing the Nazca Lines and also wanted to check out Machu Picchu so that’s what we did. I didn’t realize until we did it, but getting to Machu Picchu is a bit of a trek. It is pretty, but I’m still debating if it’s worth it based on all that’s involved in getting there and also dealing with the altitude.

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To get there you have to fly to Lima, then fly to Cusco (11,152 ft altitude), then take a 3-4 hour train to Aguas Calientes (6,690 ft), take a 30 minute bus up the mountain and then climb around Machu Picchu (7,970 ft). It’s definitely the hardest view I’ve ever tried to see and I’m sadly not sure if it lives up to that. And I feel like an asshole saying it 🙂 .

But my Mom had altitude sickness for almost the whole two weeks we were there, and is still recovering weeks afterwards and helping her struggle up those ruins made me question if this trek should be recommended for everyone overall.

Anyway, besides me weighing the difficulty of reaching a view with how beautiful it is, I also arrived in Lima, Perú 24 hours before they closed their older giant airport and opened a new giant airport in Lima, which we then flew out of. It was wild to see the opening of a new airport like that 🙂 .

I Practiced My Spanish

I intended to increase my Spanish practice for the months leading up to this Perú trip, but then…didn’t 🙂 . It feels funny to say since I’m retired, but there was too much going on (see the posts below).

• I Got A Homebase! (But Will Still Travel 1/3 Of The Year)
• I Bought A Car! What I Learned As A First-Time Car Buyer

And for once this busyness was not in my head or a retirement recalibration 😉 . I often can’t imagine having as much to do as I did when I had a job while also trying to keep myself alive and vaguely happy. Maybe that’s why I often failed on that last part.

Anyway, despite not doing all the Spanish prep I wanted, speaking Spanish in Perú went really well! I had conversations, understood what people said and had no trouble speaking and getting around without English.

It was great to see that I hadn’t completely lost the language like I had with my Italian and French by not using them. I guess that immersive Spanish program really did work a lot better than my US schools’ approaches.

• From 0% to Fluent: How I Learned Spanish in 1 Year

I Transferred My Residency

I am once again a resident of NY State. Transferring my residency from WA to NY involved going to the DMV, getting a Real ID, registering to vote, signing up for NY health insurance and cancelling my WA health insurance.

I’ll write a whole post about this entire process in case it can help other people who are looking to move to a different state, but in general I am pleasantly surprised with how relatively easy it was to do and also with the robust offerings of NY’s health insurance. I thought it would be worse than WA’s, but I was wrong 🙂 . Details to come.

I Looked Into Car Repairs

Our car made a weird sound for the first time and we acted like stereotypical new parents and freaked out and assumed the car was going to immediately explode 🙂 .

When I was in Perú, the car sat dormant so I didn’t take all the advice from the awesome BGR post below that I’d previously mentioned. Oops!

• How To Maintain Your Car When You’re Barely Driving It by BGR

And when I started driving the car again, there was an inexplicable noise so I had to investigate that. I called the mechanic that has a current warranty on my brakes, rotors and calipers, but they couldn’t see me for 2 weeks. I then called another mechanic and had a lackluster interaction only for them to tell me they could see me in 5 days. I called another mechanic and they didn’t answer the phone.

So after trying to figure out which path to take, our community came in clutch once again. There’s apparently a local mechanic in the family tree and they could see me sooner than anyone else. I drove out to them and hilariously – the noise that had plagued us stopped on the drive there. I had made a joke about that exact thing happening like when your computer isn’t working, you call IT and it instantly pretends like it never did anything wrong in its life.

Luckily I had taken a video of the sound and was able to show it to the mechanic. He also took the whole wheel (where we were hearing the sound) apart to make sure everything was fine even with the noise gone.

And everything looked good! He told me what to check first if the noise comes back (the wheel bearing) and said that next time if no one drives the car, to basically ignore weird noises until you’ve driven it for an hour because most noises go away once it gets going again and it could just be a rock stuck in there or some other one-off while the car wakes up again.

The mechanic asked for $50 for this inspection and I gave him $60 because I didn’t have change and he deserved it. I had my peace of mind that the car wouldn’t immediately explode 🙂 . It’s been driving great ever since.

And we’ve learned our lesson! We’ve now told the family members we leave the car with while we’re traveling to feel free to use it at least once a week to help keep it running smoothly.

I Hung Out With People

This month involved some of my usual virtual meetups, such as that weekly call with my Mom and Weekly Movie Nights where we watched the below. If you’re curious about my ratings of movies, I have a Letterboxd account here.

1. The Blackening
2. F1
3. Mother/Android
4. Saw
5. Saw II
6. The Last Breath
7. Top Chef (S22)

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REWATCHES

1. The Emperor’s New Groove
2. Sinners
3. WALL-E
4. Twisters (2024)
5. Quiz Lady
6. Top Gun: Maverick

My days go by so fast in this little community we’ve joined of my Partner’s family all being within 15 minutes of each other. In addition to general hangouts, this month also featured:

• Daily Morning Coffee Times
• Friday Family Dinners 
• Game Nights
• Group Knitting Nights
• Bonfires/S’more Making
• A Movie Theater outing with nearby college friends
• A Backyard Drive-In Movie for niblings
• A Top Gun: Maverick/F1 Double Feature
• BBQs
• My Partner making a Video Game with the niblings (and me providing emotional support 😉 )
• Starting a “This Week In Pictures” Group Chat tradition so I have a place to put the millions of pictures I’m taking

I Read 16 Books

Here were my favorite reads this month:

1. The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes
2. Avatar: The Last Airbender – The Search Omnibus by Gene Luen Yang & Gurihiru
3. How To Save Your Human Invader by Arden Fox

To see the other books I read this month and my ratings of them, I have a Goodreads account here. I also reached my OG goal of reading 100 books in 2025 – nice! I guess that means I need to increase my goal 😉 .

I Wrote 4 Posts

In case you missed it, this month I published the below posts:

1. The Month Of Settling Down(ish): May 2025 Recap
2. Review: Bioluminescence Kayak Tour Near Auckland, New Zealand
3. Medical Tourism: A $68 Dental Cleaning In Lima, Perú
4. I Bought A Car! What I Learned As A First-Time Car Buyer

In addition to that, I was also asked to be on the Plutus Awards Panel, but declined. This deep in retirement I’m barely on the internet, definitely not enough to know who should win awards in the personal finance content space. I basically write this blog, yeet my pictures onto Insta and run back to ‘real life’ 😉 . It was an honor to be asked though.

I was also asked to be a part of a magazine’s social media posts. I’m not sure I’ll have time for that, but I was also honored they reached out.

And this month in the realm of “weird opportunities I declined” we have:

• A Sacramento Ghost Tour (now that is NICHE 🙂 )
• A retreat for my followers (I enjoy hanging out with y’all, but this would be a paid thing and I prefer our interactions to be free 😉 )
• A CPA referral program (for a CPA I’ve never used…)

Physical

Sleep

Before I went to Perú, I was sleeping in our new place, which has lots of huge windows which is wonderful, but I forgot that the sun comes up at 5am in the NY summer and I don’t like closing all my blinds (I’m weird ok…) so my eyemask has been getting a workout. Also along with living in nature instead of a giant city for the first time in my life, my beloved birds now try to wake me up at 4am, so I’ve taken to putting in one Slim Fit Ear Plug while side sleeping so I can ‘sleep in’ until at least 7am. I love my birds, but that’s too early.

This was a part of living in nature that I had not anticipated 🙂 , but I’m happy to report that after a few weeks, I got used to it and was able to sleep unaided until a reasonable time. I guess my ears got used to the birdsongs and my eyes got used to the light. I think part of that was because the birds in Perú were noisy and the window designs there don’t block out sound at all so I got used to it fairly quickly.

However, after that I got a little sick – it seemed to be post travel related instead of niblings related (also why does this only happen when I’m off keto 🤣?) I was so stuffy that it was a bit hard to sleep, but luckily I recovered quickly and was back to sleeping like a baby soon after.

Food

I ate some yummy things in Perú and back home this month, but what blew my mind most of all was eating peas, tomatoes and herbs my MIL grew – they were delicious and it was so cool to see this process. Maybe I’ll need to add gardening as a future hobby 😉 . This month I ate keto 43% of the time and took 17 days off keto.

Exercise

On the exercise front, I’ve been doing my PT daily along with stretching and some light walking. I had hoped I would feel better enough to run by now, but that hasn’t been the case. I might have to just lean into my love of walking so I don’t accidentally mess myself up worse 🙁 .

One way I learned this lesson is by thinking I was well enough to do a weight workout with my SIL and it messed up my back worse than it had been before, so I definitely wasn’t ready. The other way I learned this lesson was by ‘accidentally’ running 3 miles a while before that. Oops 🙂 .

My PT had said that I can run a little until it hurts and it never hurt so I kept going. So I think you can see how I keep overextending myself so I just need to double down on healing and not work myself too hard. I really don’t want to be shuffling all over the UK next month. That doesn’t sound like a fun way to show that country to my Partner for the first time.

One reason I’m glad we bought a car earlier than planned was because my OG plan of walking or running a mile each way to and from my MIL’s house every day wouldn’t have happened with this injury flare up. My usual transportation choice of using my own body to get around wouldn’t have worked well. My back was not happy and I was in a lot of pain. Luckily taking it easy, going PT and stretching a lot for a week has made me almost all better, but seeing how bad it can get sobered me a bit.

So I’m serious this time 🙂 . I’m not going to push myself so I can be as well as possible for the 3 months of travel we have coming up.

Also I found this video really helpful after I was dumb and hurt my back after working out too hard:

Mental

Learning

So it’s time for my favorite segment: Fun Facts Nobody Asked For! Here’s what I learned and explored this month:

Perú

• Perú has a population of about 34 million people and is apparently the birth place of the domesticated potato and the country has over 4,000 varieties of potatoes. I tried at least 5 of them 🙂 . Also this is how the country’s size compares to the US:

• The capital of Perú is Lima, a city with about 10 million people. Meanwhile Cusco is a city of about 400,000 people, was the former capital of the Inca Empire and is the 9th highest large city in the world with an altitude of 11,152 ft.
• Meanwhile, Aguas Calientes, the town at the base of Machu Picchu has a year-round population of about 4,000.

Machu Picchu

• My biggest lesson about Machu Picchu was that I had been mispronouncing it my entire life. As I said in the Insta Reel above, apparently it’s pronounced Machu “PiCK-choo” which means Old Mountain and not Machu “Pee-choo” which is how I pronounced it until this trip, which means Old Penis in the Inca language of Quechua. Oops! That’s quite a different meaning🤣.
• Machu Picchu is a 575 year old Incan ruin that’s located 7,970 ft above sea level and is often referred to as the “Lost City of the Incas” because it was abandoned almost 500 years ago and then “rediscovered” 370 years later
• One of the coolest things I saw at Machu Picchu was the still running natural fountains that looked like mini-waterfalls. The Incas built aqueducts that were key to making this location a sustainable place to live almost 600 years ago
• In 2007 Machu Picchu was voted as one of the New Seven Wonders Of The World

Chocolate

• According to our tour guide at the Chocolate Museum in Cusco, there are 31 types of Cacao trees, 29 of which grow in South America and 27 of which grow in Perú
• We were told that mosquitos pollinate cacao trees that make chocolate so we shouldn’t kill mosquitos in the Amazon Rainforest (which Machu Picchu is right next to) and that 87% of plants in the Amazon are pollinated by mosquitoes and birds
• Most of world’s chocolate is grown in Africa and chocolate is considered more luxurious if it has a higher butter content. And the cacao that is grown near Machu Picchu has the highest butter content at 59%
• Also that butter within a cacao plant is Cocoa Butter, which I’ve been using my entire life and didn’t realize was from the same plant as chocolate!

Astronomy

I’ve mentioned before that I use the free app Star Walk 2 to look at the night sky and learn about what I’m seeing. And during my Perú trip, I discovered that similar to when my phone is in Airplane Mode and Google Maps can still provide location data for where I am, Star Walk 2 does the same while in Airplane Mode to show me the night sky.

That allowed me to see Southern Hemisphere Constellations in Perú while saving some battery. I saw these lovely constellations that I can’t see at home:

Lupus, Crux, Musca, Centaurus, Apus, Chamaeleon, Norma, Ara, Triangulum Australe

Fauna

Animals spotted this month included a lot of Llamas as would be expected, but also an adorable baby llama and the cutest baby Chinchilla! I’d never seen a Chinchilla before and this baby was absolutely tiny and adorable. We spotting it and tried to get it back to its mom at Machu Picchu.

Birds

Birdwatching in Perú was just as lovely as I suspected. I saw a lot of beautiful birds, but sadly didn’t spot a male Andean Cock-Of-The Rock, which I wanted to see because they look so wild 🙂 . Next time. This visit I was lucky enough to see these birds in Perú:

Scrub Blackbird, Saffron Finch, Tropical Kingbird, Spot-Winged Pigeon, Eared Dove, Golden-Billed Saltator, Hooded Siskin, Rufous-Collared Sparrow, Sparkling Violetear, Southern House Wren, Chiganco Thrush, Long-Tailed Mockingbird, Saffron Finch, Thick-Billed Euphonia

And these birds at Machu Picchu:

Andean Motmot (The Andes version of my favorite bird, the Turquoise-Browed Motmot!), Blue-Necked Tanager, Andean Swift, Andean Gull, Saffron-Crowned Tanager

Random

For random facts, I give you this fascinating video:

Creativity

Getting my creativity flowing was challenging while I was in and recovering from my Perú trip, but after that, I let myself do almost nothing for a week and luckily my creativity and motivation came rushing back! Since then I’ve been happily cranking out posts, but also realizing they seem to be accidentally getting way longer overall so they take more time to write and edit.

I should plan ahead to see if I can pre-write a few posts for when I’m running around the UK to make that easier, but we shall see if I get around to that 😉 . There are also a long list of fun things I want to do at home before leaving so it’s TBD.

Emotional

My emotions this month after getting back from my trip were even better than usual. My heart felt like it was bursting sometimes with how happy I was to be around my family and see my niblings hit new milestones like losing teeth and graduating school. Based on that, it seems like my hypothesis was correct and getting a homebase while still traveling a fair bit will make me even happier. We’ll see if I think the same when the summer sun leaves NY and the dark and cold set in 😉 .

On a morbid note, one thing was difficult on my emotions this month. My Mom’s dog passed away, which was challenging to experience. I try to console myself with the knowledge that he had a long and full life, but seeing my Mom go through that was my biggest emotional challenge this month. I was glad I could be there for her, but I’m going to miss him.

Money

What even is money 😉 ? But seriously, I finally logged into my Empower account to look at my net worth and I started laughing because despite spending half of my originally yearly retirement budget last month, my net worth looks about the same.

Market movements often make a bigger impact on my portfolio in a day than even that large amount of spending and that was interesting to see in practice 🙂 . Here is where my net worth netted out at the end of the month:

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Conclusion

And that’s what I got up to in June! Next up I’m packing for a 3 month trip across the Atlantic🇬🇧! I’m heading to England🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿, Scotland🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿, Ireland🇮🇪 and Iceland🇮🇸 before visiting Colorado for the first time. We’ll see how it feels to go on a 1/4 of the year trip while also having a homebase. Until next time!

If you’re interested in the other weekly and monthly retirement updates I’ve written, they’re all here:

Weekly (2020)

1. Early Retirement Week 1: The Freak Out
2. Early Retirement Week 2: The Vacation
3. Early Retirement Week 3: The Whiplash
4. Early Retirement Week 4: The Heartbeat
5. Early Retirement Week 5: The Election
6. Early Retirement Week 6: The Trophy
7. Early Retirement Week 7: The Train
8. Early Retirement Week 8: The Challenge
9. Early Retirement Week 9: The Question
10. Early Retirement Week 10: The Game
11. Early Retirement Week 11: The Recharge
12. Early Retirement Week 12: The Holiday

Monthly (2021)

1. The Month Of Rest: Early Retirement Month 4 (January 2021)
2. The Month Of Birds: Early Retirement Month 5 (February 2021)
3. The Month of Change: Early Retirement Month 6 (March 2021)
4. The Month of Atlanta: Early Retirement Month 7 (April 2021)
5. The Month of Portland, Maine: Early Retirement Month 8 (May 2021)
6. The Month Of New Hampshire: Early Retirement Month 9 (June 2021)
7. The Month Of The Northeast: Early Retirement Month 10 (July 2021)
8. The Month Of New York State: Early Retirement Month 11 (August 2021)
9. The Month Of City Hopping: Early Retirement Month 12 (September 2021)
10. The Month Of The Southwest USA: October 2021 Recap
11. The Month Of Santa Fe: November 2021 Recap
12. The Month Of Family: December 2021 Recap

Monthly (2022)

1. The Month Of Freezing My Balls Off: January 2022 Recap
2. The Month Of Thailand: February 2022 Recap
3. The Month Of Spring(?): March 2022 Recap
4. The Month Of México: April 2022 Recap
5. The Month of Mérida: May 2022 Recap
6. The Month of Seattle: June 2022 Recap
7. The Month of Washington State: July 2022 Recap
8. The Month Of New Hampshire: August 2022 Recap
9. The Month Of Maine: September 2022 Recap
10. The Month Of Acadia: October 2022 Recap
11. The Month Of Argentina: November 2022 Recap
12. The Month Of Holiday Cheer: December 2022 Recap

Monthly (2023)

1. The Month Of Snow: January 2023
2. The Month Of New Hampshire: February 2023
3. The Month Of Sea: March 2023
4. The Month Of California: April 2023
5. The Month Of Seattle: May 2023
6. The Month Of Chicago: June 2023
7. The Month Of Montréal: July 2023
8. The Month Of Troy, NY: August 2023
9. The Month Of Australia: September 2023
10. The Month Of New Zealand: October 2023
11. The Month Of Puerto Vallarta: November 2023
12. The Month Of Warmth: December 2023

Monthly (2024)

1. The Month Of Family: January 2024 Recap
2. The Month Of Costa Rica: February 2024 Recap
3. The Month Of San José: March 2024 Recap
4. The Month Of The Solar Eclipse: April 2024 Recap
5. The Month Of Arizona: May 2024 Recap
6. The Month Of Upstate NY: June 2024 Recap
7. The Month Of Montréal: July 2024 Recap
8. The Month Of Canada: August 2024 Recap
9. The Month Of Iceland: September 2024 Recap
10. The Month Of Switzerland & Italy: October 2024 Recap
11. The Month Of Amsterdam: November 2024 Recap
12. The Month Of Holiday Cheer: December 2024 Recap

Monthly (2025)

1. The Month Of Yuki Matsuri: January 2025 Recap
2. The Month Of Auckland: February 2025 Recap
3. The Month Of Sakura: March 2025 Recap
4. The Month Of Seattle: April 2025 Recap
5. The Month Of Settling Down(ish): May 2025 Recap

What’s a fun fact you learned this month?