Day 7 – Stars and blessings

I never questioned that the earth is round… but it still feels pretty flat when you are just a tiny human walking around on the surface… but let me tell you: the earth is actually round. I knew this in theory from school, but it is sort of getting in the way of my travelling. It’s like this irritating jetlag that you can’t shake every day because we keep driving slowly east without really adjusting our internal clocks.  Some days this means we haven’t really got on the road until well after lunchtime and then end up eating supper in the dark.  

Today this worked in our favor as the campground we ended up in was right beside the David Thompson Astronomical Observatory.  They host Star Walks from 10pm-midnight on the weekends and excepting the toddler and maybe Dana who is counting the days until her husband joins us, everyone was still wide awake  enough to walk down.  The kids took turns looking through high-powered telescopes to view the moon and some planets, and then watched an interesting tour of the solar system in their program room.  What fun to be up so late and watch the stars with your siblings and friends!

The earlier part of our day was also full of adventure.  We were headed for Thunder Bay and it was our second day in the land of northern Ontario, which consists mostly of windy roads with lots of rocks and trees… and a few glimpses of lakes.  We discovered that Ontario is a very big province… but we press on because, as we keep promising the kids, after we get around Lake Superior there are more things to see and they are much closer together.  These 90km/hr speed limits and windy roads are testing our perseverance but as Dana keeps reminding me, it’s a pilgrimage, not a vacation.  

Speaking of a pilgrimage, we arrived in Thunder Bay on the weekend, and that meant we had to find somewhere to go to mass. As Catholics, we take our weekend mass obligation very seriously, and did not want to miss a chance to receive communion to fortify us on our long journey.  However, we were racing against the clock and those rotten time zones that keep messing us up, so by the time we made it to Thunder Bay mass was already going on. 

Dana picked the beautiful downtown church St. Andrew’s as our destination, but being downtown it wasn’t exactly RV friendly.  We parked in a questionable spot and ran to the church. Ask Dana sometime about how they ended up in the service elevator – not sure what went on there :) At least we were seated before the gospel reading started.  We snuck in the back and thought we could make it through mass without disrupting the quiet church which was sparsely filled with older folks. 

Halfway through the mass, however, a man from the front walked walk straight to the back where we were sitting (uh-oh) and whispered in my ear that the priest wanted us to come up to the front at the Our Father to bless us.  Well- I guess we didn’t come in unnoticed, and since we had the only children in the entire church (11 of them in total) I suppose we didn’t look exactly like locals.  The kids felt like superstars walking up to the front. Everyone smiled at how cute they all were, the adults felt a little disheveled and camp-worn, but all in all it was a boost to have the whole congregation raise their hands to pray for us and our travels.  Thank you St. Andrews!