Gramado, the German town located in Brazil!

So, we have had many people suggest that we visit Gramado. It's a town started by German immigrants. It's clean, has German inspired architecture, and they have amazing Christmas events. So we finally decided to plan the trip, but I was soooo busy with my childbirth education certification that Jake took the reigns. And he planned a great trip....pretty sure that the only time the whole trip that the kids complained of being bored was waiting for the Christmas parade to start and waiting for the Christmas Show to start (and that is huge, we usually hear that at least daily). For me it was a good mix of seeing beautiful nature and Christmas nostalgia and fun dinner shows.

Day 1 We arrived on Saturday on a cold, wet night so we just headed for our airbnb to catch up on some ZZZzzzs. SO Sunday was our first day. It was still cold, wet and cloudy (well cold for us, 50ies, but November is practically summer here) because of a cold snap. So we enjoyed a cold morning walk to church through this beautiful German town decked with Christmas decorations. After a delicious fondue lunch we explored the town a bit more.

In the evening we watched the really fun Christmas parade...but we had to wait outside in the cold for an hour. We were really shivering by the end. The fake snow at the end of the parade felt legit for us.

Day 2 We spent the next day at a Olive farm. We had fun at the petting zoo. They had horses, sheep, cows, chickens, ducks, pigs, peacocks, goats, and probably a few other that I can't remember. The resteraunt was AMAZING Italian food. It was so good. We also enjoyed some amazing views from the cliffs that surrounded the farm. Then we rode floating bikes. And then we played some fun hide and go seek on a acerola grove on the farm. It was a really fun relaxing day, and we took home some delicious olve oil and jams.

Day 3 This was our museum day and Gramado has many good ones. So we had to pick a few favorites. We started in the truck museum, because we have a few people in our family who love trucks.

Then we headed to the NASA museum.

Then we took a walk to a chocolate store with an interactive history of chocolate. I should mention that Gramado has so much chocolate 1 or two shops on each block. Many of them are themed and very fun to visit just because of their chocolate decor.

After that we needed a break so we headed back to our airbnb and watched "The Mitchel's vs the Machines". It was my first time watching it and it was amazing. I definately recomment it. Then we headed back out for a cultural dinner show. We ate local food and watched people performing local dances. The location was also cool, because they had many taxidermy animals. So the kids had fun checking them all out.

Day 4 We took a tour to Aparados da Serra National Park where we drove into a cloud. It was so foggy that we could not see the imense canyon that we had come to see. But the forest itself was so unique. It had moss, almost like spanish moss, and alien-like tall pine trees. It honestly felt as if we were in another world, everything was so different.

On our way back from the hike the fog cleared just enough that we could get a brief view of the canyon. And then we had a picnic in the cold (it was chilly with all that fog).

After getting back into town we headed to the pirate themed pizzaria, called Cara de Mau (which translates to bad guy and the main character in their dinner show was Captain Bad Guy, lol). It was amazing. We felt like we were in a real pirates ship. The costumes were amazing and the servers and actors never went out of character. Jane even got mermaid face paint. And best yet the pizza was delicious. It was served rodizio (meaning they brought the different pizzas to our table and we just picked the ones we wanted to try. The flavors were all different and really unique. We all ate way too much and were singing pirate songs as we left.

The next morning we headed to Mini Mundo, which is an open air museum of mini diarhamas of fames locations. Many are located in Germany (since Gramado is a German town), but they had other locations too. Since many in our family love modeling this was a real treat. We also loves the famous characters that were hidden in the scenes like Harry potter characters, the ghostbusters and more.

Then as we walked back we saw the most beautiful Church with hydrangeas covering the hill.

The afternoon we spent relaxing and playing at an arcade in town. Jane was even able to take dancing lessons from a bear.

That night we went to the Gramado Christmas concert. It was a lot of fun to see a live nativity and hear so many Christmas Classics and hear some new Brazillian Christmas songs too. Louis really got into and we got to watch him bust into some great dance solos.

Our last day we headed to Cascada de Caracol to see the famous waterfall from various views and do a little hike. The hiking trail had a really fun playground with really modern and fun equipmant like a zip line and a merry go round at ground level. There were also passports for the kids to get stamped at the different sights along the trail. We also saw another one of those monitor lizards.

We decided to skip a traditional lunch and just eat dessert. We tried trudels, a chiminey shaped pastry. And opted to add a scoop of ice cream on top to make it even sweeter. It was yummy..and messy.

On our way back we got to ride a gondola and see the waterfall from another view. And we saw a coatie (a racoon-like animal).

That night we ate at a really fun itallian restaurant, ate handmade pasta, and enjoyed the authentic italtian feel.

We also window shopped at a lot of cuckoo clock shops (they were way too expensive for us to buy, but so fun to see them go off). And even got to see a much bigger lit up cuckoo clock.

The next day we headed home, but our driver gave us a surprise visit to Black Lake, just outside of Gramado. It was a great way to say goodbye to a fun city.