We made it to Rio!

Hello Everyone! So thankful we have internet while we are here in Rio. We had a rough couple of days upon arriving in Rio............but praise God we are settled now and having a wonderful time!
Tuesday after leaving our hotel in Curitiba we arrived at the airport (with plenty of time...hahaha) to find out during our check in that they had rescheduled our flight to Rio~ Since my email has been down for almost a month now, I never received a notice from our travel agent stating the change. Why would I think to check on it??? Anyways, we are at the counter to check in at 6:15pm thinking we have plenty of time to find out that our flight had been rescheduled for 640pm instead of 832pm. Needless to say, we arrived at the gate as they were calling "last call" for boarding. It was a pretty quick flight to Rio and being Donei's first flight ever it went very smooth. He loved flying for the most part. He experienced some ear pressure while landing that was pretty intense so we will be giving him ear plugs next time.
We arrived in Rio before 9pm and called for our taxi that was arranged already by the apartment manager we were staying at. Since we arrived earlier than expected, we had to wait for about an hour. When our driver showed up~ He was surprised by the amount of luggage we had and he had to end up calling another driver to help pick us up, so we waited again another half hour. Did they not assume we would be traveling WITH luggage?? Finally after arriving to our apartment that has been arranged by Lino, we were a little taken back by the "appearance" of the apartment and location. Here we are in a foreign country, no cell phone, no internet, told by Lino there was NOTHING else available in Rio in the Copacabana Beach area because there was a Brasil holiday this weekend, so we had no other options being 1130pm.
The apartment building was very old, run down, smelly, and had bugs............In order to take a shower~ You had to light this tank with a match to get the shower hot before showering. Trust me~ We have stayed in some pretty rough places over the years as we've been on many mission trips but here we are now in Rio and we are miserable! Many of you know Steve and how "cheap" he can be.....:) well the next day I spent several hours on the internet searching for something else in Rio. Long story short~ We found a hotel and off we were to pack and get the heck out of the bug infested, pee smelling apartment!!!!
We have a whole new attitude now and have enjoyed Rio!
Internet is challenging here in the hotel but we have it!
Today we are going on a tour called "Rio in a day" to see all the tourist attractions of Rio.
Sorry no pictures today~ Lucky to just get this out! Please excuse my spelling & grammar errors....doing this quickly before we loose internet connection again!
3 more days until USA!