Brazil Day 1: Christmas to Iguazu Falls, Brazil

Seven months ago Lily came home from talk therapy and said “Dad, we need to talk.” Oh shit. What have I done? She goes on, practiced; “kids have a right to a normal Christmas with a tree and family and presents. And we travel all the time. I would like us to stay home with family and not travel this Christmas at all.”

Sigh. On the one hand, she’s right, we only spend one out of three Christmas’s at home and the last one at home was right after Trish’s death. That one probably doesn’t count. On the other hand… well, there is no other hand. She’s right, kids should have a Christmas with family and a tree.

We compromised. We had Christmas at our house with family and then at 11pm Christmas day we leave for Brazil! Lily thinks this is pretty cool.

Christmas was awesome with my sister and her family. Fahad cooked an amazing Pakistani feast. Laurel took the kids skating while I packed and watched an Archer marathon. They are going to stay at our house after we go and do some D.C. stuff.

And we’re off!

The overnight flight is pretty easy, we sleep a few hours and the girls watch movies: Emma ‘Edge of Tomorrow” and Lily “22 Jump Street” which she loves. I get engrossed in Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”. We are in Economy Plus which is as high a class as we travel. (The girls were once bumped up a crappy business class section on a short flight from Reno to Chicago, and they still rave about it.)

Brazil has been on our list for a long time, for no particular reason. Planning it was a little harder than I imagined.

Domestic transportation is expensive, partly because the distances are so huge and partly because the roads aren’t great. Brazil is easily the size of the Continental U.S. There is no ‘easy’ itinerary one can take to see the spots.

And it’s Christmas/New Year’s week and stuff is expensive. I had no idea that Rio was a massive New Year’s Eve destination and that prices would be so high, but I had already bought our tickets. To keep it affordable and simple, I chose only to do Iguazu Falls and Rio – a comparbly modest itinerary by CreekmoreWorld standards. But we will get New Year’s Eve in Rio, which is a bucket list item for some.

Iguazu Falls is in the south, bordering on Barzil, Argentina and Paraguay, and is the eponymous home of one of the world’s best waterfalls. Foz do Iguassu is a small city based almost entirely on tourism.

But first we have to get there, and that means a day in the Sao Paulo airport, before a flight to Rio, and another flight to Iguazu falls. The whole trip from Washington D.C. to Iguazu falls takes 24 hours, much of which we spent eating bad pizza and sleeping on airport chairs.