Stuck in traffic

It was a nice night sleeping. We ran the fan on the AC to drown out the trucks driving by but I slept great. We dumped the cassette and headed off down the road and stopped to make lunch a couple hours later at another gas station rest stop. There were some pretty rough looking gas station dogs with sores on their bodies and ribs showing. The chicharrone I bought were pretty hard and not quite enjoyable so we started feeding them to the dogs and they loved them. We fed them quite a few and they devoured the chicharrone.

As we headed off down the road Google maps warned me of 18 minute delay due to an accident just down the road and it was right. There was a long line of traffic and everything came to a halt.

There was a dirt track that joined the road and quite a few cars came out of it and a few trucks and SUVs went down that track as a detour but the road was pretty rough and we would be bottoming out.

The kids started writing chalk on the asphalt. A sedan came out of the track with a flat tire and started to change the tire out right next to me. He immediately came over to ask if I had a tire iron and I did better than that. I had a set of long sockets, breaker bar, and an impact driver. I got his lugs off in less than a minute. He was trying the jack his car up but was missing a few pieces so I went back to the RV to get the proper pieces and we got his tire changed out like a NASCAR crew in only a few minutes. It took longer for him to rearrange his trunk luggage to get the tire back in the trunk.

After a couple hours the traffic started flowing and although there were three ambulances that passed us toward the accident there was no evidence of the accident as we passed by, just a bridge and a worker looking over the edge and a pile of sand on the ground near the bridge that a road crew was going to blow away with a leaf blower.

The line of cars in the other direction was so long. We were lucky to be the first side to pass through. I stopped to fill up water and gas. There was a giant dinosaur at the restaurant next door and the kids went to investigate. It turns out there was a large playground down below the hill and the kids played there for a while.

The restaurant and gift shop was clean and had ac and wifi and clean toilets. It was already 4pm and the sunset in two hours so we decided to camp here for the night. We bought some more Guarana sodas for the third day in a row and some gluten free alfajores which tasted like digestive biscuits to have with tea; which is probably what they were meant for.

The kids returned to the playground and there were miniature horses there I tried to play with the alfajores but they were too skittish. 

We did some laundry by hand.

A Brazilian woman who spoke English came over amazed that we drove here from California and gave us her contact information and invited us to stay with her near the coast. The people we have met on this trip have been so nice.

There was a stick bug on our tire.

I did some paperwork to return to work in a couple months.