Sandbox
Back to the land after our visit to Caxias[edit] | ||||||
| Posted by Nad on 20 June 2014 at 17:00 | ||||||
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This post has the following tags: Our second year on the land
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We got back to the land yesterday after spending about ten days at Eduardo and Tiago's place in Caxias. We had an awesome time there as Eduardo introduced us to some really nice people and showed us some beautiful places that we all cycled to. Beth also found some really excellent organic markets and shops that are actually better priced than most supermarket's chemo food! And she also found a good meditation group, a yoga class she liked and some nice Buddhist contacts, so we'll definitely be trying to come to Caxias a lot more regularly - and hopefully we can do it by bike! Here's a few photos of our time in Caxias...
Tiago's parents (Max and Lucy) were really keen to see our land too as they also have a nice spot of rural land that they grow their own food on as well, so we went with Eduardo in his car with the new bike on the roof, and Max and Lucy followed in their car. When we got to Lageado Grande we dropped in to our old neighbours, Ivor and Erenita, to pick up our bikes, so for the last 20km we had all three bikes on the roof.
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Aran's new bike[edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 16 June 2014 at 16:43 |
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This post has the following tags: Our second year on the land
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| Eduardo found a really good bike for an excellent price that we went to take a look at this morning. We were to meet the guy selling it at 11:30, but he's a dentist so we had to sit in the waiting room for a while first - it turns out they do that for all appointments, not just the dental related ones! The three of us all had a little ride around the car park out back on it and all liked it, and Eduardo looked over some of the finer points and gave it the thumbs up! So Beth handed over the cash (but not after a bit of negotiation to knock another R$100 off the already insanely good price!) and we took it back to Eduardo's :-) Now we just have to find one for Beth!
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Visiting Caxias[edit] | ||||||||||||||
| Posted by Nad on 14 June 2014 at 17:57 | ||||||||||||||
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This post has the following tags: Our second year on the land
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| We're in Caxias now, and have been here for about a week now. We cycled the first 20km from our land via Lava Pes to Lajeado Grande which is the closest place that has buses that go to Caxias. The ride to Lajiado Grande was pretty easy and so next time we're going to try and go the whole way to Caxias which is another 60km of highway! hopefully by then we'll have much better bikes because one of the things we're doing here is trying to find some good second hand ones for a reasonable price. We're staying with our friend Eduardo who knows a lot about bikes and is helping us find some good deals :-)
A couple of his cycling friends have lent us their older bikes (which are still extremely awesome and a lot better than we'll be buying for ourselves!) so we can get an idea of how much better it is to have a decent bike to ride on. Eduardo took us on a ride of about 40km with quite a few hills, and although the last hour was pretty hard we managed it pretty well :-)
He took us to some really nice places with lots of orange trees we could fill our backpacks from, and to a beautiful little village called Otavio Rocha which is one of the original places where the Italian settlers came to. The village is really clean and tidy and has free wifi for everyone! We went to a bakery so Eduardo could show us a traditional kind of fresh baked bread called Cuca with melted chocolate in it :-)
We set off back to Caxias from Otavio Rocha in the early evening, and still felt pretty good at that point. But the last part of the ride coming in to Caxias was a huge hill which must have taken the better part of an hour to get up, and by the time we got to the top it was dark and we were really tired!
When we finally got into the main city, Eduardo took us to Parque da Festa da Uva where they have the traditional grape festivals, and it was a really nice view with the full moon over the city. This is actually where Candido took us the very first time we came to Caxias, and we took a photo from exactly the same spot which I've included here too :-)
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