Back from Brasil!

Richard and I had the pleasure of traveling to Brazil this summer. We were gone for 2 weeks. We flew first to a small beach town called Garopaba.
This is a picture of our good friends Greg and Thais. They were our hosts.

Here is a photo of the beach house. It is the house painted yellow. It is 3 stories high, so the big yellow portion is the bottom floor, and it continues up to the top yellow portion.

This is the view from the deck outside the family room, and our guest room. We were able to watch whales playing in the bay each day.

One of our favorite things to do was to take a long stroll on the beach each morning. We would walk the beach, and then go into town to pick up our day's allotment of freshly baked bread.

Here we are with Thais' father, and her two boys. The local fishermen go out fishing everyday. We walked down to the beach and purchased some very fresh fish. The fishermen clean the fish right on the granite wall behind us. I am positive that it violates some health code here in America. The fillets are in one bucket, and the guts are in the other bucket.


We decided to take a short cut through our fisherman's boat house to get back to the main road. Our fish is in the plastic bag.

We spent one week in Garopaba at the beach, and then we flew to Sao Paulo. This is a picture of Sao Paulo at night. It was taken from the top of a hotel/ night club.


While in Sao Paulo we stayed at the home of Thais' brother and his family. Here are our hosts, Tom and Luciana, with a beautiful Sunday morning breakfast.

Luciana's parents, Mimi and Vera, hosted a real Brazilian churrasca (shu-has-ka) in our honor. Otherwise known as a BBQ. They own a beautiful home complete with a separate entertaining complex, tennis court, and pool. Not to mention the coconut trees and occasional wild monkey swinging in them.



Luciana's parents also own a ranch just outside of Sao Paulo. Behind us is an orchard of bananas, nuts, and various fruits.


At the ranch, Mimi ( the owner behind me), had over 200 head of sheep. I loved playing with the baby lambs.



This picture and the narration that follows was provided by Richard. He was only pretending to be me to try and encourage me to actually get on the blog that I started and do something with it. I guess it worked.

Hubby and I went to Brazil, sans kids and loved every minute of it! Here we are in the city of Garopaba in the state of Santa Catarina. We loved it there!

Richard had been planning this trip for over twenty years. In August of 2009 it finally became a reality. The trip was really two trips in one. We spent the first six days in Garopaba. This was the relaxing part of the trip. In hindsight, it would have been best to end here.

The last seven days was spent with our friends and their family in Vinhedo, a commuter city about 30 miles west of Sao Paulo. There was nothing relaxing about this portion of the trip. We were running and having fun until midnight or one in the morning EVERY night! However, it was all so fun.



You can see all the fun we had here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/41564519@N07/

More photos to follow...