With our newfound freedom, Felipe and I decided to drive to the beach for the day. We arrived in Ubatuba in the early afternoon and packed a picnic for the beach. We drove around until we found a beach with minimal number of sunbathers and staked out a place for the afternoon. We also found milho verde (corn ice cream), which had thus far been elusive.
Unfortunately, a local recommended that we take the coastal road back to Sāo Paulo. Even more unfortunately, we listened to him. Bad call. Not only was the two lane road at an almost standstill, the car started to make a strange noise about halfway into our journey home. The noise got so loud that we stopped to change the tire just to make sure that it wasn't something in the wheel. The noise continued and at that point, it was dusk, raining and the gps looked like this:
No, that's not a child's scribble, that is a twisty road straight uphill through the mountains. So we gave up for the day and let the Brazilian road win. We called it a night in Caraguattuba and waited for a tow truck and taxi to deliver us back to the city the next day (thankfully the insurance worked just as it described that it would). We arrived without further interruption.
