Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Let's Get Tan

A few days after arriving in Brazil, we headed off to the beach with some close family friends. Nathanael and Julie have two sons, Ethan & Micah who are just around Sawyer's age. The boys get along great and I knew the three amigos would have such a blast at the beach together!

...and what better way to get a family road trip off to blazing start than a good ole' flat tire?.....

We finally made it down to the coast all still in one piece! We headed off for lunch at this little place that was owned by the same people that owned the hotel we were staying at. We ended up coming to this little joint quite a bit over the next couple of days because the food was great and it was right on the beach.


























I walked out of our room one afternoon and spotted this:

Why wouldn't Bill be up in a coconut tree?












After shimmying his way up the tree and pulling a coconut down, the hotel owner was kind enough to whack it open so we could all have a taste......fresh coconut water!!!!!

Yummy Yummy!

Out for dinner at a local pizza place. Brazilian pizza is a lot like Italian pizza-not much sauce and baked in a brick oven......soooo good! And thank goodness they brought out a basket of little pizza wedges to feed the hungry little animals, I mean children, before the real pizza came!













Bill enjoying his kiwi caipirinha.....

We sat and enjoyed this beautiful sunset while eating ice cream.....

Sawyer and Micah scouting......

One morning we headed out on a dirt road that was mostly potholes to a waterfall that you could hike to. We parked the cars under the trees, messed with a dog that I'm sure was covered in fleas, lathered in the sun screen, doused ourselves with OFF Deep Woods and started the hike to the waterfall....
























The hike started out like this:

Which was fine for the little kids and my mom.....

But then after we crossed a few rivers, it started to look like this:

It was at this point that my dear mom headed back to sit in the car and play the ipad and the rest of us trekked onward and upward!

We finally made it to the water falls and the boys got to splash around in the chilly water while the more adventuresome part of the group climbed up to the big waterfalls.

Of course Bill and his friend Mercer couldn't resist not climbing up to an edge and jumping off.....













Later that afternoon we rented a little boat that took us out to an island .

It was soooo pretty!!!!













The boat guy took Bill, Mercer and Nathanael up the side of the island and they all spent the afternoon jumping off.....the rest of us stayed behind and the kids went snorkeling in a little cove and hunted for shells.


The guys found some coconuts and bashed them against the rocks to get them open...

It was such a fun afternoon but boy was everyone pooped!













This was the view from our hotel, which was right across the street from the beach. The sunsets were always so beautiful! This little joint was a place that we had dinner at one night-it was just a super cute outdoor place!














After a few days of soaking up the sun, it was time to head back to the city......but not without a stop at McDonalds :)


This was the 3.5 Liter pop that Mary found at a little grocery store next to McDonalds! It was huge! It is called Guarana and is like the national drink of Brazil (besides coffee of course!) Bill and I always drink as much of it as we can while we are there and stuff our suitcases with it on our way home :)

Brazil Trip 2011

So we aren't even going to address the fact that there hasn't been a blog entry for months on end. We are simply going to gloss over the last the couple months of radio silence and jump right in! I will be doing a few entries of our amazing trip home to Brazil that we did for Christmas because we just couldn't leave that undocumented, but I will warn you that it will be mostly pictures and not much captioning.....because frankly, I'm just not in the mood :)
So let's get started, shall we?

This is what our front entry looked like the day that we left. Eight ginormous suit cases (each weighing just under 70 lbs), four carry ons, two lap top bags, two purses, three ridiculously bright neck pillows and one little blue back pack.....

Now I just have to add a little caveat here that 85% of this stuff was not ours...they were things that we were bringing in for other people (including a large flat screen TV that I still can't believe made it down to Brazil unscathed....) So before you go judging how pack-ratty you think we are...it wasn't as bad as it looks :)


After one of the easiest check-ins that Bill and I have ever done together at the airport, we settled in for a stop in Houston and then the 9 hr. overnight flight to Sao Paulo. Thankfully we were equipped with lots of electronic entertainment, books, coloring stuff and card games....

Oh! And I forgot to mention that our roommate Mary went on the trip with us too!!! We were so excited to share Brazil with her and all the fun things that come with it!!!