Rollin' on the Rio

Dear Mom,

Oops. I mean, Hello readers! (same thing, really)

No more rants. I promise. I've got nothing but smiles to report.  OK, that is a complete lie. Promise rescinded. But we are going to start out positive, dagnabbit!  Since my last post, we got back on the Airporter the very next day at exactly the same time.  We checked in with the same United folks at the airport who seemed to have the same troubles with our tickets as they did the previous day. But we remained optimistic and we retraced all of our steps exactly as the day before.  It was deja vu all over again.  But this time they actually let us board the plane! It took off and we were actually on it!  The Houston layover was a breeze, including the stop in the baggage services department and the subsequent and necessary trek back through security afterwards. The flight to Rio was tailwind all the way.  Our luggage showed up without a hitch and we taxied to our apartment to find the Allens waiting for us with open arms and full beer cans.  Let the vacation begin!

The only issue left from our previous ordeal was that we'd only have a day and a half in Rio, with about six days worth of touring planned. But that was no problem for the dynamic duo of Mark and Carol, our built-in travel agents. So after about 10 minutes of acclimation we were out the door and ready to explore.  But I have typed nearly a double figure number of sentences and haven't bitched, moaned or generically complained yet. "Who is this mystery author?," you ask. Surely it cannot be Steve writing this blog or there would have been a snafu pointed out by now.  Something is afoot at the Circle K. Well, you are correct to assume the worst from me.  I do have a complaint. Totally my fault, but still.  Here comes the sob-story of the post. Break out your tiny violins...

Here's a pic to tide you over while you endure my sob story.

As I always do, I packed a spare contact lens case and solution in my checked luggage, but put my normal case and a small bottle of solution in my carry-on.  This way, if I wanted to close my eyes on the plane, I could remove my contacts and have a place to put them. That was on the first day of not-so-much-flying. But then we came back home and I had to remove the case and solution from my pack when I went to bed for the night.  Guess who forgot to repack those things in his carry-on the next day?  So I slept a bit on the plane with my lenses still in my eyes and then suffered the results for the remaining hours leading up to getting to our apartment. I also fell asleep in the taxi on the way to the apartment as I'd only gotten an hour or two of sleep on the plane.

Air quality was poor, so good long distance shots were tough.

No big deal, right? Well, anyone who wears contact lenses knows that when you wake up with your lenses still in your eyes, said lenses are invariably dried out and stuck to your eyeballs.  Usually this is only a minor inconvenience once you can get them out and your eyes will recover within minutes. This time however, not so much.  I think I scratched my right eye when removing the extremely stubborn lens because for the next eight hours I could not open my eye for the pain.  It was virtually oozing tears and was redder than a Stanford campus stop sign.  It was far closer to hospital-begging-level-pain than it was to minor discomfort and I looked like an idiot crying his eyes out on the beach for the rest of the day.  At one point I was put in charge of watching young Josh frolic in the large waves while the other adults walked the beach (the girls were all sitting on the steps ogling volleyball machismos). This arrangement was fine with me because I wasn't going to enjoy the walk in my condition in any case. But it was difficult for me to keep track of him because I had to constantly blot my oozing eye with a sandy towel and I kept losing him amongst the waves in the process.

Understand that I obviously had no contact lenses in, but I couldn't wear eyeglasses because I needed sunglasses due to the unbelievably bright sunlight not agreeing with my ultra-sensitive eyes. So my vision was pretty darn poor without wearing my regular prescription glasses, and tracking Josh was difficult.  I even tried to wear sunglasses over my prescription glasses, preferring over letting my son drown, the only other option of looking even more the idiot on the beach to all the presumably lovely bikini-clad Brazilian women walking by.  I say "presumably" because I never actually saw anyone on the beach, opening my eyes only long enough to spot Josh and then crying, blotting and protecting against sun and sand for the majority of the time. Thankfully, J-Dawg managed to not drown while I not-watched. I'm sure you expected the story to get worse before it got better based on the build-up. But that's all I've got.  Josh nearly got lost trying to find me amongst the thousand of other lounging tourists, as he had drifted down-current, but he never nearly drowned. Disappointing as a climax for the story, but not really disappointing in terms of J-Dawgs general health, I guess...

Ipanema Beach in the late afternoon.

So that was my Rio beach experience.  Apparently everyone else in our eight person group had a blast.  There was much volleyball happening around us, especially the version that people play without their hands (and are still better than I am with them(mine, not theirs, why would I have their hands?)).  And since we as group are all volleyball fans, that provided an excellent source of entertainment for a least an hour.  The kids loved the warm Atlantic waters and the soft sand.  The adults loved the people watching.  I loved my towel but pined for an eye-patch.  I was attempting to remain pleasant company by enjoying humming Antonio Joao Gilberto's iconic tune to myself as I sat there leaking from the orbit on La Playa Ipanema, but for all I know, the girl from the song walked by and all I could say was AAAAAARGH as she did. Not quite the inflection that is called for in the tune.

One more for good measure, with different lighting. No, Josh didn't drown. He was behind the photographer at this point.

We also walked the Copa Cabana beach, which was a bit closer to our apartment, though not as nice, but humming Barry Manilow couldn't quite keep me as happy as the Bossanova did. Once in Copacabana, Carol was on a quest to find an exotic juice she hadn't tried before and after multiple failures we almost made it home fruitless (see what I did there?), but in the end we did find her some Graviola and Cupuacu. Yum.

My eye was healing slowly and by this morning there was not enough pain left to complain. How sad, I mean wonderful, for me. We had spent the evening trying very hard to stay awake until a reasonable hour, lagged via jet as we were, but we failed miserably and fell asleep early and woke late the next morning much more equipped for whirlwind sightseeing. Mark and Carol (travel agent superheroes, remember?) had booked a local tour where we would catch many of the hot spots, each sweeter than the last.  We saw multiple "Favela" neighborhoods, an eye-opening experience to be sure, punn only slightly intended. We walked a bit in the Parque Nacional da Tijuca, the largest mid-urban rainforest in the world. We high-fived Jesus at the iconic Christ the Redeemer statue in Corcovado. Not certain this should rank as one of the "Seven Wonders of the Modern World" when Angkor Wat doesn't even make the list. But it was pretty sweet. We checked out the old town in Santa Teresa and the party town in Lapa, where we climbed the famous Lapa steps and ate feijoada at a local favorite restaurant.  We took the Swiss-type gondolas up to the summit of Sugar Loaf Mountain to get magnificent views of the city at sunset. The kids got one last dip in the Atlantic back at Ipanema beach.  Not bad for nine hours of daylight.

The Christ the Redeemer Statue was quite impressive. The crowds were crazy.

Again, with the air quality, but still pretty cool.

Now we are back home in our cozy apartment planning tomorrow's trip back to the airport. But I have to mention that Carol and I got one more fantastic Rio experience by catching some live BossaNova music at the bar right next to the bar where the very song I was humming yesterday was written. Without much imagination, that bar was actually named "The Girl From Ipanema Bar". Apparently they don't have live music at the Girl From Ipanema Bar, they just write it there.  So we went next door.  The opening act was so good, I bought his CD. He played many of my favorite Jobim songs including Desafinado, perhaps my all-time favorite.  How nice of my wife to call ahead and make sure the musician played that tune just for me in that random bar that she pretended she hadn't scoped out before-hand.  She even had the forethought to get the tour guide earlier in the day to suggest that particular bar to me. I told you she was a superhero! The featured act was also excellent but we left a little after 11:00 p.m. only a half hour into her set because we had to be up seven hours later to have time to catch our flight and it wasn't a short walk home and darn it, jetlag! I know, I'm a light weight.  At least I am still up typing this silly blog for all three of you...  Mom.

The gondola rides up and down Sugarloaf Mountain were spectacular.

The views from the top were even more so.

Sunset was pretty sweet from up there.

Tomorrow the plane goes wheels up at 7:30 a.m. on our way to Iguazu Falls where we will cross the border to Argentina and then cross back and then cross over one more time, just because we can. Apparently the viewing is better by day on the Argentinian side, but the accommodations at night are better on the Brazilian side.  I am taking Mark's word for it, as the amount of research that I've personally done on the subject has maxed out at none. Next time I write we should have exchanged all of our Reais for Pesos and forgotten all of our "obrigados" in favor of "graciases".  Until then, "Tchau!"

The gang's all here at the Lapa Steps which feature thousands of tiles from all over the world.