19 hours of travel by planes, trains, and automobiles!
Here are the newest pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/traveltt
We have arrived safely in the crazy, yet beautiful city of Rio de Janeiro. Woohoo!
We had a 9 hour layover in Chicago on our way, making it a total of 19 hours of travel, plus lots of delays, etc... to get to Rio. Here is a layout of our first 36 hours:
6:30a - 12:30pm flight from SD to Chicago O´Hare Airport
1.5 hour metro-bus-metro ride into the city (we had to get off the metro and bus to the next stop due to construction on the railway)
4 hours in Chicago: 94th floor of the John Hancock Observatory for a great view over Chicago, Ghirardelli and Hershey´s Chocolate Factory (the whole reason we went to CHI!!), Lake Michigan, Field Museum, Acquarium and lots of walking!!
1.5 hour metro-bus-metro back to the airport
Waited 2 hours to board, finally boarded, mechanical problems - exited the plane, re-boared an hour later and left at 11:30pm at night on a 10 hour flight to San Paolo Brazil.
After an hour of the slow immigration process, we were taken by a United Airlines official on a nice bus for an hour ride to the domestic airport (since the delay at Chicago made us miss the connecting flight to RIO), we got our tickets and ran through security in about 5 mins., finally getting on the shuttle to the plane before the plane took off.
We arrived in Rio and it turns out that regardless of how similar Portuguese is to Spanish, the taxi drivers still did not understand a word we said. :) We finally found a hostel (everything is pretty expensive in Rio...even a dorm room bunk bed is $20 a night).
So now that the crazy weekend of travel has come to an end, we were able to rest a bit and enjoy the beautiful scenary as we took a cable car to the top of Sugar Loaf Mountain (see pic on right) to watch the sun set behind the Christ Redeemer overlooking Rio. We also wandered along the huge Copacabana beach, surrounded by hotels.
Up Next:
Buenos Aires: We head to Argentina tomorrow to visit Igacu falls
Then off to Ushuaia for a couple days before our cruise!!
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