So what did you do over the Christmas holidays? Shopping? Putting lights up? The usual holiday stuff? Anybody happen to scale to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa?

    Oh yeah, we left that one off the list.

    Believe it or not, that’s exactly how local residents Benny Torres and Alan Espino spent their December, and what a December it was.

    Throw Bill & Ted’s Great Adventure right out the window. Benny & Alan had their own great adventure and last week they sat down with the Gazette to talk about their colorful story and share some spectacular pictures as well.

    “What an emotional moment for both of us,” said Torres. “Here we were, virtually on top of the world looking down. A moment in your life you will never forget.”

    Anyone who sees Torres today, at 26, probably would never recognize him. Eight years ago he was a heavy, overweight pizza delivery kid working at Roman’s Pizzeria. He and Alan, younger brother of Miami Springs City Councilman Dan Espino, had bonded as friends while attending Monsignor Pace High School. Torres attended Springview Elementary and Miami Springs Middle School while Espino did his pre-high school years at Blessed Trinity in Virginia Gardens. Later on, looking at an old photo, they discovered that had been students at New Beavers Kiddie College (now Kids Kollege) 20 years back.

    “Even though we went off to different colleges we always remained friends,” said Torres, who went on to earn an advertising degree at the University of Florida while Espino went to FIU and is currently a veterinary anesthetist.

    After going through a major lifestyle change (losing 100 pounds), Torres moved away to work in Chicago where he has been for the last four years. But he kept in touch with Espino and once in a while the two would vacation together. Leading us to our mountain-climbing adventure story.

    “I think I was on the phone with him last August when I said, ‘So what do you feel like doing this time?’ ” said Torres. “I knew I was going to get four months off from my job and would have time to do something.”

    “I just kind of threw it out there,” said Espino. “I said, ‘Why don’t we go to Africa and scale Kilimanjaro.’

    “I told him, ‘Sure, why not,’ ” said Torres. “I wasn’t sure how serious he was about it but Alan called me a few weeks later with a lot of the travel information and it took off from there.”

    With Espino, via lots of Internet searches, hammering out the travel arrangements, the “great adventure” began on Dec. 4 when the two flew to Nairobi, Kenya, a 20-hour trip.

    After spending one day touring the Nairobi area, it was time to board a bus and cross the border into Tanzania for the eight-hour trip with the small town of Moshi as the destination. In the meantime, they needed to find a guest house.

    As Espino put it, “Someone who really knew what they were doing when it came to finding us the right places to stay and right people to see when it came to putting together a package to scale the mountain.”