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Mum & Dad's 2018 holiday in Brazil begins!
Posted by Nad on 11 March 2018 at 14:23
This post has the following tags: 2018 Holiday in Brazil
Mum & Dad arrived in Brazil the day before yesterday! I forgot to take the camera when we left the land and I've also been changing over to a new Purism laptop that they brought over from New Zealand with them, so the blog has started a couple of days late sorry! They flew from Auckland to Santiago (Chile), spent a day there, and then flew another six hours across the continent to São Paulo, and then took another couple of hours on a connecting flight to Porto Alegre. Meanwhile, Beth and I drove from the land to Canela where we unpacked all our luggage into the apartment we've rented for the week, and then I caught the bus to Porto Alegre about three hours away to meet Mum & Dad at the airport. Their plane arrived right on time and we were on our way to a hotel about half an hour after I got to the airport. The next morning we had breakfast at about 9:30 and then got a taxi to the bus station to get a bus back to Canela. We all arrived in the apartment at about midday :-) We've just been relaxing and going out to nice places for lunch and dinner, but one thing Mum and Dad did do here in Canela was visit the Caracol Falls and go on the gondola which gets some very nice views of the falls. After that we went to lunch at a nice buffet called Paradouro Rural which is a few km out of Canela to the north, they have good traditional Gaucho food as well as a good vegetarian selection for Beth and I, some nice speciality beers and some free Cachaça ;-) They also have tables overlooking a really nice view of the valley, those eucalyptus in the background are around eighty meters tall! It's amazing that it's only 40km from our land, but yet there's tropical fruit there that's really thriving like papaya and banana. Unfortunately, on what was to be our last day here in the apartment in Canela, it was pouring with rain all night with thunder as well. We thought this probably wouldn't be a very good situation to go to the land in, so we've extended our booking until Monday, and then we'll go straight to Caxias from there. We can do a day trip to the land if the weather picks up, and stay there for longer after Caxias. So meanwhile we've set our selves up for some rainy days in the apartment :-)

New house design for 2018
Posted by Nad on 6 March 2018 at 00:28
This post has the following tags: Our sixth year on the land
Oops! I should have posted this a month ago! The bad feng shui in our house has been driving Beth crazy12345 so after getting some emergency interior design advice from our friend Irena, we bought some new furniture in Canela and made some long overdue changes!

Guest bathroom started
Posted by Nad on 4 March 2018 at 23:48
This post has the following tags: Our sixth year on the land
We've been so flat out with so many different things that we haven't made enough progress on the guest house and Mum and Dad are arriving in less than a week! So when the neighbour Vladimir and his friend Bento offered to get the bathroom started we were very happy to accept :-) They got the main structure and roof done, and half the walls (that was all the wall boards we had), and they got all this done in just one day! The structure is positioned facing north so that I could put the old solar panels on it, but unfortunately only one of them is working now - still a single 150W panel is fine for lights which is the main thing.

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