Tuesday, March 21 we left Gramado, through the other Pórtico Gramado, and drove back to Porto Alegre.

Here is the arrival side of the portico.

Every town we drove through, no matter how small, had at least one nice soccer field in it.

I love seeing the countryside, but I have this terrible habit of trying to take photos while we are driving. They never turn out and they never do justice to the scene I’m trying to capture, yet I keep snapping them! Here are a couple that capture at least some small feature of the towns we drove through.

We couldn’t leave southern Brazil without eating at a churrascaria, since this is where they were born. We found one close to the airport so that Grandma and Grandpa could meet us there (their rental car was due earlier than ours was, so they took Uber).

We had a fantastic meal! Raine — our super-duper picky eater who we were afraid might starve to death while in Brazil because she refuses to try almost all new foods — discovered a new favorite… chicken hearts! Yup, the gaucho brought them around and we all hastily told him “no thank you” except Raine who said she wanted some. We all looked at her with one eyebrow raised and asked, “really? Chicken hearts?” She assured us that she wanted some so we weren’t going to stand in her way. Next thing I knew she had eaten all three of them and was saying that she wanted more. None of us could believe it; although I was pretty sure that she didn’t realize they were actual chicken hearts, not like chicken fingers where it just describes the shape of the meat, but I sure wasn’t going to tell her!

We still had a little bit of time before our flight so we drove off to find the Porto Alegre temple. Daddy wanted to attend a temple session while we were in Brazil but the universe conspired against us — the temple in Sao Paulo was closed for maintenance the two weeks we were there and the Porto Alegre temple didn’t open until late afternoon on Tuesday so we couldn’t get a session in before our flight (not to mention they don’t rent clothes). We had to settle for looking at the outside.

On the way back to the airport we were stuck in traffic when this guy trotted past us!

Finally we made it to the airport and boarded our plane.

We flew off into the sunset, arriving in Iguaçu after dark.