The day is a long eastward crossing from the Missões plateau into the Serra Gaúcha, the landscape changing register as the road climbs from open cattle country into the folded vineyard valleys of Italian Rio Grande do Sul.
The 8:00 am departure heads east across the flat Missões plateau, cattle country on rolling grassland. Fuel is in Ijuí, before the route swings toward the Serra Gaúcha highlands and the terrain begins to rise and work itself into something more varied.
Passo Fundo has been a crossroads since muleteers began using the ford over the river of the same name in the eighteenth century — a staging point between the pampas of the south and the markets further north, along a route that bypassed the longer coastal path through Viamão. The city was formally constituted in 1857 and grew quickly on the back of erva-mate, cattle, and later wheat, becoming the principal urban center of the northern plateau. It calls itself the National Capital of Literature, a designation written into federal law, anchored by the Jornada Nacional de Literatura that has drawn readers and writers here for decades. The Guaraní name for the area was Goyo-En — deep river, much water — and the place has kept that sense of being a place where things meet and pass through.
Lunch here, before pushing on into the Serra.
Deleting this waypoint is permanent and cannot be undone.