Italy 2014 Day 01 – Monday 20 October

My view for about ten hours...

Well, the long-awaited day finally came … very early.  Actually, with packing and preparing for the trip, we barely got to sleep at all.  I hadn’t actually intended to sleep at all, but I couldn’t sleep as late as I wanted to Sunday morning, and after about 18 hours with my contacts in, I just couldn’t take it anymore.  And by about 01:30 we were both pretty much done, so out my contacts went, and out we went … sort of.  I kept thinking of things until my alarm went off at 02:30, when up we came, in my contacts went again, and by about 02:50 we were in the car headed for St. Mary’s School.

To make a long story short, we got to the school, got our luggage on the bus, heard Mass in the chapel promptly at 03:15, and were rolling out of Natchitoches right on time at 04:00.  With one stop along the way – by the way, Exit 571A, Texas Best Smokehouse, has a great breakfast! – we got into DFW only a few minutes late (I didn’t note the time).  We met up with the Magnificat representative accompanying us for the pilgrimage, Alexis Darbonne, who gave us our etickets.  TSA was typically … impatient (I don’t want Homeland Security paying me a visit!), but now at approx. 10:00 we are sitting at gate E17 waiting for a 10:50 flight to Atlanta.  [20 Oct 10:07 CDT].

To make a much longer story short [because it kind of is a blur at this point, Tuesday evening] our flights to Atlanta (where the non-Natchitoches pilgrims joined us) and thence to Rome went great.  I actually slept about four hours on the latter, which didn’t keep me from being exhausted through the day on Tuesday ….

One note:  There were obviously many other pilgrim groups on the flight from Atlanta to Rome, and at least a dozen priests and religious, including (we discovered in the Rome airport), Fr. Z who did our parish mission in March [LINK].  We felt very safe on that flight!