April 17, 2015  Rio de Janerio Day 1

Today we arrived to Rio at 12 noon.  I had my workout session with Leanne but Bill took some great pictures as we sailed into Rio 

We have a tour at 2pm.  It is called a  Boutique adventure because it is so limited.  18 lucky guests are going to a private Mass in the chapel at Christ the Redeemer statue.  In case you didn’t know it that is the statue of Jesus you see whenever they show Rio.  We left the pier at 2pm and the traffic was horrendous .  We were told there is always traffic but since today was Friday and it is a long weekend because of some holiday it was much worse.  It took us over an hour to get to the chapel.  The bus took us only so far and we had to take the train up to the top of the mountain.  It took us up through the rain forest.  As we drove up it was quite foggy and you could hardly see Jesus.

We had Mass in the chapel at the base of the statue.  There were 18 seats.  Fr. Tom from  the ship said the mass and he said when we leave we should all exhale and hopefully blow the fog away.  Well we all did this and low and behold we were able to see the statue perfectly.  Talk about the power of prayer and faith!  I must say it was truly an awesome experience.  I am so glad I signed us up for this over 6 months ago.

We also had a night time tour to go to a nightclub and watch the Samba dancing.  I cancelled this awhile ago as I thought it might be way too much in one day.  Well as it turns out it was a good thing I did cancel as we did not return to the ship till almost 6pm and we would have had to leave at 6:15pm.  I would have been panicking!

We came back to the ship and had dinner.  There was a local show called Carnival of Rio.  It had a lot of Mardi Gras in it.  It was okay.  We had an early night and headed up.  Tomorrow is another day in Rio!

Chapel where our Mass was held in the bottom of the statue

view after Mass

Before our Mass you could hardly see it.