We had Duck’s Portuguese teacher and his wife over for dinner the other night and at some point, the topic turned to transportation. Allan had spent some time in Belo Horizonte and was giving us advice on getting around without a car. However, one of the things on our giant pre-Brazil to do list is to figure out what to do with our car, Vivian. While I doubt Viv would survive the bazillion-mile drive to Brazil, it piqued my curiosity and set me to googling how long it would take to drive there.
Unfortunately, this is not days of yore where Google Maps would give you driving directions from the U.S. to Japan by telling you to drive to the ocean and then paddle across it. This time, I got an error message saying that no route was available between Boston and Belo Horizonte. I tried fine-tuning various segments of the would-be drive until I narrowed down the problem: there is a section of green – solid forest, or jungle, or whatever is there – in southern Panama where there are no roads through to Colombia. Alas, we will not be driving Viv to Brazil.
But we are working on making our giant to do list! Now that things on the family front are feeling much more under control, we are able to take a deep breath and realize that we are only three months away from leaving, eeeek! So this morning I sat down and went through some of Duck’s flashcards. I often cycle through what the word is in Spanish before either remembering or looking at the word in Portuguese. Duck is better at the accent, and I’m overall better at the vocab because it’s often so close to the Spanish.
We’ll get there… one way or another!
(PS – If you’re curious, it’s 94 hours from Arlington, MA to Yaviza, Panama, and 123 hours from Apartado, Colombia to Belo Horizonte. Throwing in a few for the miles of forest to cover if there were a road there, and rounding up, we’ll say 240 hours, or 10 days if you drive straight through.)
(PPS – Also, I had real pão de queijo at Honk! a few weeks ago and it was delightful. I then proceeded to accidentally text the new landlord about it instead of Deborah, but she responded with interest so all’s well that ends well and I’m going to try to stop being embarrassed about it.)
Horntoes in Brazil 