Not every day of traveling is perfect and our start to day six of this trip wasn’t what I’d call “smooth.” We woke up fine and finished packing up and went to check out and meet our driver downstairs. After ten minutes of discussing our bill with the front desk (a few things looked off), we finally checked out and joined our driver to take us to the Rio airport.

Even after the minor setback yesterday I was going to do whatever it took to make sure we made today's tour happen. Fortunately, I didn’t have to do anything, I woke up feeling 95% better and by the time the alarm went off at 6:30 AM, we were both amped to get going. We met our tour guide, Alexandre, downstairs at our hotel a few minutes after 7 AM and were off. Our first (and only stop) today was to go to one of the seven wonders of the world, the Christ the Redeemer statue. A good portion of the reason for our visit to Rio was to see this statue and it was worth it all.

When we woke up this morning my stomach was killing me and I wasn’t feeling good at all. My Oura Ring said my body temperature was +4 degrees over normal, so pretty sure I had a low-grade fever as well. We had originally planned an all-day tour in Rio and when I woke up I knew that was in jeopardy. I gave it a few minutes but realized that I wasn’t going to make it.

When we originally started to put the itinerary for this year's trip together we were thinking of just doing Rio and Buenos Aires. But as we looked at flights we realized that we’d need to stop in Sao Paulo and so added it on and boy are we glad we did, it was an excellent first stop to the trip. We woke up early this morning for a 6:30 AM pick-up to take us to the airport.

We were both so tired last night when we got back from the 3+ hour dinner that we decided to extend our alarm ahead of time and skip breakfast this morning. It was a good decision and outside of a room service Cappuccino and Orange Juice we rolled out of bed a little after 8 AM and were downstairs in the lobby for our 4-hour tour of Sao Paulo a few minutes after 9.

After a 9-month hiatus, we are back traveling the globe with our first vacation of 2023. But before we got today we should remember that this is a similar trip we had planned in 2020 that was of course canceled due to COVID. After a significant amount of planning, we are off for 10 days in Brazil and Argentina. We began the trip on Thursday, April 20th after a half day of work. I met Jenn back at our apartment where I dropped off Frasier to go to Far Fetched and we jumped into an Uber a little after 3 PM. I am not sure what was going on with our Uber driver but he decided to take the slowest route possible and we made it to JFK a little before 5 PM. A long drive.