6/15 - Day 2

Dear Dick,

Police escort. Neal and I asked for directions from the police and because they didn't speak English, they escorted us 30km to our destination. More on that in a bit.

I slept for about six of the nine hours of that São Paulo flght. I took Benadryl and melatonin pills, so that may have helped. It was great to arrive in the morning having slept.

Let me apologize in advance for what is going to be a long letter with detail about our troubles here. Things have not gone well and it has not been very fun.

In Natal, we had to pick up a rental car and somehow connect with Bill and Charlie at the airbnb place in Pipa, about two hours to the south of Natal. Neal also wanted to take care of giving over the extra tickets we had sold to another group of US fans. This all was the beginning of our technology troubles for the trip.

There was free wifi in the airport, but it was at best only good for checking email. Cell phone coverage was nearly useless. Neal and I have T-mobile with their excellent international roaming, but getting our phones to connect rarely worked.

I had tried to download a Northeastern Brazil map to the nav software on my Nokia, but it was never going to finish in a reasonable time. So we set out with only a pdf copy of a google map Neal had managed to load on his little netbook. We rolled the windows down on the bare bones Fiat Uno from Budget rental and I drove us off.

The roads didn't seem to match Neal's map, so after several minutes of driving we decided to turn back and try to get a map and directions at the airport. It is here where we learned that Natal had opened a new airport a week or two prior to the World Cup. It had the same name as the old one and the change had not really been communicated to travelers, at least not to us. So with a map and some new directions from the car rental place, we headed out a second time.

Neal wanted to try to connect with people once we got into the city, so we drove the hour or so in and looked for anything hospitable enough to have wifi that travelers could use. This was a major waste of time because we drove around and around and couldn't really get anywhere. The streets are poorly marked and it was dark (it's winter here so sundown is around 5:30).

We were finding that we could sometimes receive SMS messages, but not send them. Neal could make calls, but not receive them. Neal's extra ticket contact, Pam, was able to send him a text about her arrival, but he had to respond by voice call. It was a mess. From the vague exchanges we somehow guessed that she might be going to the fanHQ thing that US Soccer was hosting. We drove over there and parked, while Neal went in with the tickets. Ten minutes later he comes walking out empty handed. It was the first thing that had gone right for us. she happened to be standing at the entrance and he recognized her from a picture she had sent him.

So off to Pipa we went, but not before stopping to get something to eat. We got burgers and fries at Habib's, a Brazilian fast food chain. We managed to get a call in to Bill at some point too, so they knew we were on our way. Neal was driving at this point. We headed south to try our luck in Pipa.

After an hour on BR101, we came to a sign that our directions said we should be watching for. It was a directional to the town of Arés. So we turned off there, getting passed by a police car with flashing lights on the way.

There was some sort of a road block at the road to Arés so we went around the roundabout there and stopped. We decided this was a good time to ask for directions from the police. There were three or four police cars and a few civilian cars parked there. It was not apparent what was going on, but it did not appear threatening at all. No one there spoke English though, so the police offered to lead us to Pipa by car!

We got on the road, following the car with its flashinglights. You'll be happy to know that I got video of it, Dick. The police led us to the Pipa highway exit and another 10km before waving us along. Nice!

Another 60km to go and we would be in Pipa. We didn't know where the house was, and further attempts to call Bill failed. But when we rolled into town, around 12:30am, there was a throng of people in the street drinking and dancing to loud music at the surrounding bars. As Neal encroached on the party, threatening to run over toes with the Fiat, I heard Charlie call my name from a balcony at one of the bars.

We made a plan to drive through the crowd up to a hill and meet Bill and Charlie there. They got in the car and Neal slipped the clutch to get a start up the steep incline. A squeal of the tires and we were moving.

The house was a small two bedroom cabin within a gated small community. We unloaded there and then headed back out to finally relax and have a couple of beers.