Preparing for vacation - 13 days left

Driving in Brazil! What an adventure!

This is the first time we will be renting a car in Brasil. And, since we will be doing a lot of driving in strange cities/states we are bringing the GPS along! I’ve heard many times that the maps for Brazil that Garmin sells are useless and my friends usually download maps from the internet. Since I’m not that tech savvy, I ended up downloading the Brazil map from Garmin and now we are praying for it to work. For safety, I have also printed from Google Maps many of the routes I know we will be driving on, but Maceió, for example, will be a mystery.

I wonder how I’ll rate the experience of renting a car in Brasil. The car rental prices are about three times a regular car rental in places like LA or NYC. Also, they demand a deposit from R$500 (American citizen) or R$1,200 (Brazilian national) for the car rental. We were reading the terms for Hertz in Brasil yesterday and we could not believe the amount of hidden fees – there is even a drop off fee of R$55.

So far, car rentals are the big splurge during our trip! The largest chunk of our budget will be left in the car rentals companies in São Paulo and Maceió! And that’s not fun!