Hello from Rio!

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Today we flew from Puerto Alegre to Rio. Thought we were gonna miss the plan. The traffice from Novo Hamburgo to Puerto Alegre was really awful. The highways are only 2 lanes each way. There was one back-up due to an accident and another due to a car stalled on the side of the road. This was about 9am. Then we had to deal with getting the rental car returned. It turned out that we thought the plane left at 10:30, but it left at 11am, so we were ok. Had beautiful weather for flying again.

In Rio it was cloudy when we landed. The guy that was supposed to pick us up was about 1hour late. We went right to lunch (by now it was 2:30pm.) Another restaurant with wonderful food and, yes, more food pushers! They just kept coming to the table with their huge skewers of mostly beef, but some chicken. Beef is a big deal here ´cause beef is one of the Brazilian exports. It´s delicious. It´s raining now, so no trip to the beach this evening. Tomorrow we´re supposed to do some sight seeing. One of the places we´re going is the Christ Redeemer statue. It´s up on a mountain and a must see. If it´s rainy or foggy, you can´t see much of the city from there. I hope we get to go.

Tomorrow afternoon we are on our way to Buzios for the next 3 nights. Buzios is on the beach and I´ve been promised that I´ll be allowed to just lie there for awhile and not be run all over the place....at least for 1 day! I don´t know if the hotel has internet available, so the next blog may not occur until I return.

Stay warm!

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