Two Days in the Sun
A couple of days ago I said to Joy "I don't want to spend the day wandering
around under the hot afternoon sun." She assured me the trip would be 
simple: bus to Lidl for our first visit, buy some groceries, bus home 
right to our door. Simple.

As we got off the bus across the street from Lidl I joked, "Sure, the bus
stop is right here, but the return bus stop is half a mile away." I really
need to keep my mouth shut some time.

Lidl is apparently owned by the same soulless multinational investment
firms as Aldi, and it showed - piles of random stuff in between rows of
industrial freezers. But MUCH quieter than the Pingo Doce grocery store
next to the Livramento, which is always crowded.

As we left we saw a 4474 bus dropping off more shoppers like us, and when
it moved along we crossed to the bus stop across the street. 

The 4474 didn't stop there coming back. The nearest bus stop was the 
big interchange half a mile away. So we should have caught that 4474 we
saw and taken it to the next stop. The next one wasn't for 40 minutes.

So I schlepped the groceries over to the interchange and waited in the
shade of a building and got on the next 4474.

It was going the wrong way. It reached the shopping mall and the bus 
driver ordered us out and turned on the "out of service" sign and 
drove away.

So we waited in the hot sun a while and took an Uber home.

Yesterday I walked over to rent a car for Joy's birthday weekend, 
arriving just before 2:00 when the office was due to re-open from lunch.
Nobody showed up but they'd left a phone number. I called it, and no
one answered.

I looked at my phone and saw a bus to the Xtracars rental place way up
the hill was due in five minutes, so I caught that. Walked half a mile
from the bus stop and dicovered absolutely no sign of Xtracars. So I
looked at my phone and walked half a mile to the Enterprise car rental,
which ALSO turned out not to exist. Somebody in their space explained
that they'd moved two years ago. So I looked at my phone and, chatting
with my daughter, walked another half mile in the hot afternoon sun to
an Avis car rental that not only existed, but was willing to rent me a 
car.

Which is all to say that we have a rental car today (for which I had to
pay two extra days, because they're not open on weekends and there's a 
municipal holiday on Tuesday, so we can't return the car until Wednesday.)

We're going to stay at an AirBnB not far away and explore the local area
with a car at our disposal. Should be a fun trip! 

Hopefully I won't have to spend a lot of time in the hot afternoon sun.

But I probably will.