Father-daughter trip towards a dream

by Semírames Ávila (Brazil)

A leap into the unknown Brazil

Have you ever been to São Paulo - Brazil? Well, although I have been living on Brazil my whole life, I had never had the opportunity to go to São Paulo until some years ago when I made my own opportunity moved by the desire of making my father's dream true. Since I was little I have been watching my father sing and listen to a local band, they are not very famous but inside my home they have always been "the most famous band to ever exist" and I have seen and heard my dad playing their songs on his old guitar since I remember. So when I came to know that this amazing and unknown band would sing in São Paulo, I just had to buy the tickets. And I did. The satisfaction of watching the huge smile dad gave me when I hand him the tickets was worth all the trouble we would still get into only so we could see that those three people singing to my childhood songs. On the week before the concert I went to the bus station next to my home only to realize that a bus travel was way out of my budget, so we decided to travel by car and, after I downloaded a GPS app on my phone, we were ready to get to the road, then on the weekend my father and I got into the car at three AM and headed to our little advanture together. You see, our very small hometown is at least a nine hour drive away from São Paulo and we just didn't know what to expect from the road and from the most populous city on the country, but we took a leap ito the unknown anyway. "It's an adventure", dad said smiling happily to me some minutes before my phone (and the GPS) died and we started to get lost in the middle of nowhere. What do you do when you are lost on a road with no places to stop? You keep driving, that's what you do. We drove until we finally crossed paths with a gas station and, let me tell you something, gas stations are not the best place to ask for information, truck drivers are the people who actually know something, but we had to deal with what we had at the moment. About 25 miles after, we notice a plate indicating that the gas station guys were most certainly wrong (or maybe messing with us). Luckly soon we found a small town and bought a charger for my phone (GPS!!!), but only to see that we had missed an entry 20 miles back and to return to the right side of the road we would have to actually drive about 20 more miles ahead. What was supposed to be a nine hour drive, was already a almost-ten-hour by now. Dad and I stopped at a restaurant to buy some food before leaving the town and got a table at the back of the place, and I'm not sure I have ever seen anything that beautiful or felt that peacefulness I experimented at that moment. Right in the back of the restaurant we could see a lake and the mountains we had gone through hours before. We sat there in silence observing how far our little advanture had taken us, feeling the wind kiss our faces and drinking that simple watermelon juice that somehow until this day I haven't managed to igual. Almost three hours later, fed and back on track, we got to the right road and drove towards our final destination, no wrong turns this time. After what became a 16 hour trip, we got to São Paulo, found a hotel to spend the night (too tired to think about saving money by now) and drove a little bit more to actually see and hear the reason we had gone that far. And you know what? It was all worth it. Not only because of all the childhood memories those songs brought back, but also (and specially) because of the look on my father's face when he realized he was living his dream right there.