Tuesday March 14, Raine and Carter went to the mission office with Grandma and Grandpa while Daddy and I packed our bags for the next leg of our vacation. Once we were packed we hailed an Uber and headed to the airport for our flight to Porto Alegre.

Everything was going well until we arrived at the car rental office and they told us that they gave away our car and didn’t have any more for us. Daddy walked to the lot next door and found that they were completely out as well. It was getting late in the afternoon and we still had a 2-hour drive ahead of us when we re-boarded the rental car shuttle headed back to the airport to see if one of the other companies had a car available. Fortunately, Hertz came through for us and soon enough we were loaded up, heading to the coast. We arrived in Torres about an hour after dark and settled into our apartment.

Wednesday morning we walked to the local grocery store to buy warm sweetbread and fresh fruit for breakfast and a few other things to stock our little kitchen. After that we walked down the cobblestone street and across the boardwalk between the dunes to the beach.

The water was the perfect temperature and the beach was littered with seashells and sand dollars to be collected. It was fairly windy, which churned up the sand in the water, but otherwise we could not have asked for better beach weather.

Our apartment had beach chairs and an umbrella for us to use, it was great for us fair-skinned sun-seekers.

That afternoon we drove out to Parque da Guarita to hike the cliffs.

This view is looking toward the southwest.

There was a surprising number of cacti on this lush green rock.

This view is looking northward, toward Torres and the beach we played at earlier.

That night we had a delicious seafood dinner out on the beachfront patio of Restaurante Cantinho do Pescador. Carter LOVED drinking Guarana the entire time we were in Brazil.