I have only seen transparent jet bridges at Sao Paulo’s airport.
Wednesday Night, April 23
I’m on my way home with an hour to kill here at Guarulhos airport. I flew to Sao Paulo this afternoon from Rio. I have the overnight flight to Dallas and then I continue to Philadelphia in the morning, landing sometime after noon. This isn’t the most direct flight – I leave Rio about 4 hours earler than the Miami departure, but it’s an almost-free frequent flyer flight, so I can’t really complain too much. I’ve taken this series of flights before – It’s not too bad.
This afternoon, as we were getting ready to leave for the bus station, Monica had a phone call from her mom, who wanted to know is she could ride to Rio with us to see Monica’s niece. Magid had a baby a few months ago, and she hadn’t seen her yet. Monica’s sister was coming too, so Monica didn’t have to brave the Rio traffic for the drive home. No bus ride, we were taking the Tipo instead.
We picked them up (it’s on the way) and took via Dutra to Rio. Our Tipo, which seems as if it has a mind of its own sometimes, made the trip okay, except that the air conditioning decided not to cooperate. It worked really well on our trip to Rio last week, though. We stopped at the outskitrs of Rio to fill up with natural gas, (less expensive than Volta Redonda, hmmmmm) and the car wouldn’t start after we filled up. One of our Tipo’s pecularities is that when the starter motor gets hot, it doesn’t crank very well – much like the late 60s and early 70s small block Chevrolets after installing headers. It doesn’t happen that often, but we had a fully-loaded (5 persons and my luggage) Tipo that had just pulled us over a mountain on a warm day. A few minutes to cool off is usually enough to solve the problem. If I was going to own the car for a while, I might replace the starter, but given the price of car parts in Brasil and the state of Italian electronics, I’m not sure that I wouldn’t pay a lot of money for a starter with worse qualities. In any event, we pushed the car away from the GNV pump and I quickly jumped in and bump started the engine back into life. The rest of the trip to Rio was uneventful, especially so because Wednesday was a holiday (St. George’s Day) in RJ state and the traffic was really light.
I checked in with one big suitcase filled with Monica’s stuff – her purse collection, some books and the like. I’m sure that we’re going to hit AA’s weight limits when Monica finally comes in July, so whatever we can get to the US early is a bonus. I’ll be able to bring some stuff in May and June, too. With about an hour to kill, we went upstairs for coffee.
As it turns out, nobody was able to reach Magid or her almost-husband by phone, so everyone was just going to go back to Volta Redonda after I boarded my plane. It was a fun trip, though…
More later,
Greg
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