Silverglaze

I’ve been tasked with planning my family’s vacation trip to Brazil this Christmas. I’ve been travelling to Brazil for over 10 years now and have lived in the country for 2 years on top of that and I’ve never planned a trip like this one.

You would think that having a few extra bodies on trip that you’ve done lots of times before wouldn’t be a big deal, but it’s added a whole new level of effort. Trying to figure out schedules and then throw Christmas into the mix and well it’s been interesting. Who would have thought 1 month may not be enough time?

I’ve never actually bought a Brasil guide book before. But I actually got two of them.

1) Lonely Planet Guide to Brazil
2) Guia Brasil 2005 - Quatro Rodas

The first one is pretty good if you don’t speak any Portuguese. It’s fairly concise and explains some great things to go and see in even small little towns. It also has some sample itineraries that could be useful if you wanted a plan laid out before you.

The Guia Brasil is unbelieveable…. almost to much information. Even if you don’t speak Portuguese this is a book to pick up . It has lists of hotels in every little town to big cities and even lists of the best places to eat in each location. If you can spend the time to figure out 20 or 30 words of Portuguese this book will become your bible.

The part I love the most is the Sao Paulo restaurant section. Most cities have maybe a page of places to eat…… Sao Paulo has about 8 pages. And these are just the ones they recomend.

I live in Canada, but we have this travel agency that seems to get just the most incredible deals on flights. It’s Peerless Travel and they beat everything I found online by about 20 percent…. and this was high season.

Were planning on spending Christmas week in Florianopolis. I’ve been there before and it’s just awesome. Guia Floripa is a great site for pictures and information, only in Portuguese though.

Another town I hope to go to is Buzios. This place was made famous by Bridget Bardot and everyone I’ve talked to raves about it. I can’t wait.

Well there that’s what I’ve been up to over the weekend….. well besides my horrible golf game.

I’ve been a bit remiss adding entries as of late. This damn job thing keeps getting in the way. It’s amazing how doing two jobs for the price of one can suck up alot of your time. Add in my little web development business and well….. it’s been a busy month.

A few years ago when I was a consultant travelling all over the world (Well at least the east coast of the USA and Canada) Iwas eating like crap and living on an Airplane. I made it to prestige status with Air Canada in 4 months…. enough said on that.

But back to the eating. So I was piling on the weight and I wouldn’t call myself a potential NBA star by any means so when I got on the scales one day and I was 199 pounds I just about freaked. I realized I was one cheeseburger way from being 200. I had to do something.

I rarely do things half way so I jumped on the atkins diet. This was 4 years ago and there really wasn’t this whole low carb craze going on at the time. I found it a bit of a pain to eat stuff so what I did was kinda radical. Atkins has this induction phase for the first week that means you have zero carbs that week. Well I did that for about one month. I lost 30 pounds and felt a world better.

I kept the weight off just by jogging, etc but this past winter I was lazy once again and have started to pack in on although not as bad. I realized i was 183 pounds one day. So back to the diet…. not as radical this time but I’m still losing. Down to 169 this AM. Not bad for a month and I really haven’t been that crazy. I even had a sandwich a couple of times.

All my co-workers have been teasing me, but I just tell them you’ll all be thanking me when I bring in my vacation photos of myself in my speedo. The low carb diet really pays of for everyone