March 8, 2011 · 9:23 am

Rio Day Two—Carnival!


Well, we made it. Please excuse any typos, spelling errors, grammar mistakes, or poor sentence structure, as I’m typing this up on about three hours of sleep.  Carnival was nothing as I imagined.  For one thing, it’s highly organized.  The twelve districts of Rio de Janeiro compete to see which can mobilize and choreograph the better parade, including floats, dancers, singers, and myriad marchers.  There must have been thousands in each parade, which are spread out over two consecutive nights.  We managed to stay for the first four full parades of the second night, leaving the Sambadrome Marquês de Sapucaí only well into parade five and after a soaking rain that began halfway through parade three and which lasted through all of parade four.  But by 5:00 A.M., we’d had it.  We got back to the hotel just before 6:00 A.M. and slept the sleep of the dead until 9:45 A.M.

Because of the rains, I was only able to photograph the first two parades extensively, and only part of parade three.  The following photographs should whet your appetite until I can get some more ready for a later blog entry:

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March 7, 2011 · 8:43 am

Rio Day One


Well, here we are in beautiful Rio de Janeiro for Carnival. We arrived Sunday morning a little after 9:30 A.M. local time after a rather lengthy flight out of Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport that began with our Boeing 767 pushing back from the gate at around 7:45 P.M. the night before.  Our hotel is in the famed Copacabana district, which is where all today’s photographs were snapped.  Copacabana also appears to be Party Central for this thing, as you can tell by the crowds.  Unfortunately, still photographs fail to give you the full flavor of what’s going on here, and the overall sobriety of many of the participants.

Internet access is from a nearby internet café, as the hotel wanted to charge well over $20 for twenty-four hours of access.  There’s nothing cheap in this town!  Even pizza for two and a couple of sodas will run you close to $30.

Tonight we have tickets for the Sambadrome Marquês de Sapucaí, which is where the various samba schools have their competitive parade for Carnival.  If all goes well and the lighting is good, I’ll try to get photographs posted tomorrow.  Until then, enjoy these:

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March 4, 2011 · 12:29 am

Blame It on Rio, or . . .


. . . perhaps Pyrat’s of the Caribbean. Or maybe even Sex on the Beach.  Hey, I can dream, can’t I?

As you read this, Ursula and I should be packing for our latest journey. We depart Saturday morning for Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, whereupon we face a four-hour layover.  After swimming upstream against a raging river of humanity cascading toward us as we slowly but inexorably make our way toward our gate, we’ll be boarding a flight for Rio de Janeiro to attend Carnival.  And you know what that means.  It’s PARTY TIME, BaaayyyBeee!

After we regain consciousness (I figure we’ll come to sometime around midday Wednesday), we will put back on our clothes, if we can find them, and make our way for the Star Princess for yet one more night in Rio de Janeiro.  At least for that night we’ll be off the streets and out of the gutter.  Just kidding.  We really have a hotel for the other three nights.  Whether we’ll be in any condition to find it is another matter entirely.

From Rio we’ll be cruising our way up the coast of Brazil, stopping in Salvador after a day at sea.  Two more days at sea puts us in Fortaleza.  After that we leave Brazil behind us and head for the Caribbean.

We have three days at sea following our departure from Fortaleza, after which we arrive at one of my all-time favorite destinations, Barbados.  Time to stock up on bottles of Mount Gay Extra Old Rum, assuming we’ve recovered from the Rio party by then.  The next two days will see us prowling first Antigua and then St. Thomas.

After St. Thomas it’s two more days at sea before reaching our final cruise destination of Fort Lauderdale.  We’ll be staying there for one night so that we can spend some time with our youngest daughter, our son-in-law, and our three grandchildren (we have four more of those stashed away somewhere in Virginia, by the way, as well as another daughter and son-in-law).

Days at sea mean writing, bridge (the game, not the structure), reading (thank goodness for Kindle), dining, wining, whining about the price of wining, movies, maybe a little Texas Hold ‘Em, followed by more whining about wining, visits to the art auction where the wine flows both free and freely with no whining, ending up with an art purchase bill that brings about a whole lot more whining, only this time not about the wine.  It’s enough to make one see red . . . red wine, that is.  But at least on Princess I know we won’t be whining about the dining.

At any rate, I may not be able to keep up my thrice weekly updates.  If I can, I will try to give a running travelogue of our adventures and hopefully be able to post a picture or two.

But if you’re looking for something good to read in the meantime, you really need to check out that great little mystery novel Decisions (available for both Kindle and Nook) by some hack writer named R. Doug Wicker.  Think of it as a charitable donation.  Trust me, after this trip he’ll definitely need the money.

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