The excitement is building, the travel mouthwash bought, wads of paper copies of everything printed and the realisation that we really haven’t worked on our walking fitness anywhere near as much as we should have. I’ve got the Voltaren packed.

We did a walk this afternoon and I did a final test of the camera, and a test of getting the photos uploaded and blogged. I tried to pretend we were being tourists and had interesting things to take photos of, but my acting skills can only go so far.

Last week I tried to pre-book the rental cars and I’ve now experienced first hand why Louie gets annoyed getting anything done with Brazil. There was a lot of translation shenanigans going on, weird types of insurance, crashing websites and sites based in Brazil that didn’t seem to know about any Brazilian cities to pick up from. Thanks Avis, you suck. Needless to say we are going to sort out cars when we get there. That’ll be Louie’s job, my Portuguese is not ready for talking with real people.

Thanks to Duolingo I am barely able to piece together random words and sentences such as “the spider is not an insect” and “the armadillo has a ball”. I’m going to come across as a raving lunatic. I can recognise some very important words though; frango, carne, cerveja and “meus pés doem”.

Despite the fashion crime, I’ve got my belt bag all ready to go once again. I’m pretty sure it helped me break the trend of losing my passport, and this time I’ve got an international drivers license to keep track of as well. High stakes stuff.

Right, this all works fine, enough of my rambling. Next update may be either at the Airport waiting for the flight or somewhere from South America. Having landed safely, not from the side of a mountain. I’m keen on not trying to re-enact Uruguayan Flight 571, I fear I’m far too succulent to resist.