Road trip!

Peter and I had one night back at his house and then we left this morning for Itamambuca Beach. As the crow flies, Peter lives 25 km (15.7 miles) from the beach... but there are no crows. We had to drive from Peter's pretty much the opposite direction to catch the highway, and then headed toward the beach. You're pretty much going through countryside and mountains. We had a brief stop at San Luis de Paraitinga, an old (maybe 200 years?) town that had some really cool old buildings. We walked around a bit before heading onward to Ubatuba.

Quick stop at the store at the dairy "factory outlet" (Peter's official term) to have a quick coffee and buy cheese and fresh butter for our trip.

The buildings in San Luis de Paraitinga are really beautiful with great colors.  

They are rebuilding the church in San Luis de Paraitinga. It suffered a lot of damage during some recent floods, but it looks like part of the old building is being incorporated. 

Me at the lookout before we head down the scary hill. 

Basically the countryside rolls along at about 2,000-2,500 feet before the highway takes a scary, super curvy track down the mountain to the beach. You drop that elevation in 9 km (about 5 miles). It's sort of like being on the road down from a ski resort... only longer.

We drove around Ubatuba, the main beach city in the area, to buy groceries and check it out. It's pretty ugly. After a brief tour of the wrong beach and a quick stop for acai, we made it to Adolfo's house at Itamambuca Beach. I had never heard of airbnb.com before my friend Bob* at work mentioned it, but it's really cool. People all over the world rent out rooms in their apartments or houses. Adolfo's house is really nice and super close to the beach. It's everything as billed - yippee! We already hit the beach and are now hanging out having cocktails on the porch. A couple of young women from France are also staying here. It's great. We will stay here for a couple of nights and then we head to Paraty.

*In somewhat bizarre timing, Bob is traveling in Brazil at the same time I am. Here's a link to his travel blog: http://bobstravels.wordpress.com/. As far as I know, Bob has yet to step in a cow pie on his vacation. :-)


www.airbnb.com