Day 42 & 43 – Rio grand finale
By Thursday, March 22 we were back in Rio for a final visit with family. In the morning we did some last minute shopping as it was raining heavily so no beach visit. Back at Luisa’s we had a superb send off lunch. Luisa made shrimp shoo shoo, Denise (cook) made aipim, breaded fried cauliflower, salad, rice and pork loin roast. Liana made banana meringue and a walnut cake (made dry then soaked in sugar syrup) for dessert. All amazingly good.
There were 12 of us; Mike & I, Derek & Marketa, Christina & Miguel, Luisa, Liana, Sylvie, Solange, and we finally met up with Angelina & Rogerio. Derek & Michael spoke with Rogerio about days past, especially motorcycles! But language was a bit of an issue. Angelina speaks no English, but there were enough bilinguals to help translate. We went through old photos, and photos of their daughter and granddaughter – both beautiful.
That evening we finally went for ice cream and I had my two fav new flavours; coco (coconut) and dolce de leche. After packing, we sat up late with Liana chatting.
On Friday we had our last amazing fruit breakfast where I loaded up on manga, mamao and bananas. We managed to escape with only a few tears for each good-bye. They were mostly mine, but Liana also – she is apparently known as ‘melted butter’ as she cries at everything including mass!. A taxi driver friend of Liana & family drove us to the airport with lots of time to spare. The ‘last call’ for our flight did catch us off guard however when it came 40 minutes before take off! No worries though as it was a pretty empty flight to Panama.
And so our South American tour wrapped up with lots of amazing photos, and many wonderful memories. Not to mention the successful escape of 6 weeks of Canadian winter!
