Concerning the Existance of Gusty Winds
More pictures coming soon.
I, along with a couple other seminarians have just returned from a trip to the City of El Paso, Texas. This is meant to document the trip in some way shape or form. Don't forget to subscribe to the RSS feed.
Saturday, August 6th. 1830h: I wander around St. Thomas and find myself looking at a stained Glass window with the seal of St. Boneventure. I take a practice picture of it with the digital camera that I have recently purchased.
Shortly after, I head to Aaron's apartment, where I lay down for a couple hours of sleep.
Sunday, August 7th. 0230h CDT: Aaron and I wake up, and head over to pick up Matt.
0300 CDT: We arrive at the St. Paul Seminary and pick Matt up. Matt had returned from a Central American Tour two days previous. We then depart the twin cities and head for the Sun City - with a few stops along the way.
0630 CDT: We arrive in West Des Moines, Iowa. Matt wakes up. Thinking that we might take advantage of the extra time that we have, we fill up our Gas Tank with the cheapest gas of the trip. Not only was it only $2.14/gal, it was also 90 Octane. This is because in Iowa they add Ethanol to the Gasoline. It is supposed to burn cleaner and also supports the local corn farms. We then head to attend Sunday Mass at the home parish of Noah Beacom, who we have not seen since the day he returned from Rome. Afterward, we go out to breakfast with him. After catching up, we take our leave and continue on the journey. Except that there's one problem - Noah doesn't know how to lead us onto the freeway! We have to drive all around West Des Moines before we find out how to get back on the interstate!
1300h CDT: A stop for Lunch at Sonic in Liberty, Missouri.
1400h CDT: Grr. This is a holdover from last year. Grr = Tollbooth. Unlike the extremely happy tollbooth operators we found in chicago at 0300h last year on our departure, our tollbooth operator is kind and curteous but not nearly as happy as the Chicago men were. She was as friendly as could be expected, but not quite the same as the toll booth operators.
1800h CDT: Arrive at the homestead of the Williamson family. Boy is it weird being in Kansas and yet seeing my family. My mother had literally spent the entire day cooking and had prepared a feast for us. We ate all the olives. Again.
2000h CDT: The neighbor comes over to talk. Apparently she just wanted to meet a real seminarian. She met three.
2100h CDT: Sleep.
Monday, August 8th: 0015h CDT: Wake. I had set three alarms to go off at midnight, but none of them did. Luckily, my internal clock woke me up at 0015h. Had it not, we would have slept till the next morning.
0045 CDT: Depart Kansas. We have a little bit of a hard time finding a place where we can get Gasoline, but eventually we figure it out and head out.
0130 CDT: Aaron makes a wrong turn (actually, the road turned and he missed it), and so we end up driving down a different one. Past a prison. A large prison. With lots of Barbed wire. Aaron doesn't want to stop to turn around, so we take a 30 minute detour on the trip out.
0230 CDT: One strange thing about Kansas and Oklahoma at night is that you see lots of flashing lights on the horizon. Yellowish white ones. They are kind of like the white strobe lights that you sometimes see on top of tall buildings or radio towers, only they are 20 feet off the ground instead of 1,000. Upon asking my father, he explained that it was meant to keep the deer out of the fields. The only problem: there are lots of deer, and lots of fields. The only place that isn't field is the road. That's reassuring... In the meantime, we nearly hit an Armadillo. Shortly thereafter, we join up with US-54, the Highway that I lived on in El Paso during high school.
0400 CDT: We leave Kansas to a sign that says, "You are now leaving Kansas. Please come back soon." Oklahoma doesn't even offer us a greeting! It's terrible. The road, however, is the nicest yet. Two lanes each side, divided and concrete. Not bad at all. Smooth sailing here.
0500 CDT: We cross into the Texas Panhandle! Speed limits of 70 on the US highway.
0600 CDT/0500 MDT: We cross into New Mexico. Things are starting to look a lot more like desert now.
0700 MDT: We take a breakfast break at K-Bob's in Tucumcari, NM (I didn't know that they still existed!). We're now fully in the desert. US-54 now joins Interstate 40. A couple miles more and we're getting our kicks on the Historic Route 66.
1000 MDT: Arrive in Albuquerque. Take a Right turn. Things would have went a lot faster if we had taken a left here.
1100 MDT: Arrive in Santa Fe. "Realize" we should have taken a left. In the meantime, visit the Miraculous Staircase and Cathedral of Santa Fe. 
We also see this beautiful stained glass window of St. Catherine.
Outside, we find two Tractor-Trailers sitting outside the Loretto Chapel. The funny part is the warning signs they have.
Makes me wonder what they were doing in that chapel...
1300: Grab a quick lunch and its off to the VLA, Back through Albuquerque on I-25.
1500: A right turn in Socorro, NM.
1630: Arrive at VLA. We are greatly amused by the fact that the VLA is also land that is used by ranchers, and cown wander free over the grounds.
1800: Depart the VLA. Head for El Paso.
2128: Pull into a Subway in Truth or Consequences, NM. Though their lights and sign are on, they are closed says a worker. Great. Decide we can go without dinner or get something in El Paso.
2300: Arrive in El Paso. See my Godmother and her son, Roy for the first time in a couple years. Promptly fall asleep.
Tuesday, 0800: Wake. My Godmother makes breakfast for us. We leave and go to see the Mission Trail. One of the missions was under restoration. The other two were beautiful, though. We see the longest running parish in the US. And the second longest running one. It was founded 10 miles down the road and 1 day later.
1300: Linch at Kiki's, an El Paso landmark.
1500: Visit Scenic Drive and Washington Memorial park and say evening prayer with little kids running all around us.
1600: Head to the Cathedral of St. Patrick.
1700: Mass at the Cathedral. Find out that it's a school mass, since it is just starting. One of the most interesting homilies I've ever seen.
1830: Depart the cathedral after mass and head up and over Trans Mountain road. Ice Cream at Baskin Robbins (yum) and back to my Godmother's house. Sit outside and talk for a good while. Luci (my sister's best friend from High School, my date to Prom Senior year and Roy's Girlfriend as of a couple days after prom) comes over. We talk late.
Wednesday:
0800: Mass at Holy Trinity. See Msgr. Calles, the pastor who has been there since I lived near there.
0900: Depart for Alamogordo.
1030: Visit the Space Musem. See how to fly the space shuttle. Crash it twice before it really lands. Then lunch at Blake's Lotaburger.
1300: Off to White Sands Aaron thinks that it looks like snow and finds himself being careful not to skid on hidden patches of "ice" on the road.
We laugh at him. We find an earless lizard. And fire ants.
1600: Head back to town.
1700: Shower and clean off all the white sand.
1800: Meet my father (who had just come there to take a job at UTEP), Ms. Toni Tropiak (my high school mock trial coach and government/economic teacher) and Katie Maguire at the Great American Land and Cattle Company. Eat the BEST steak I've had in a VERY long time. Ms. Tropiak gives us a talk about how she just got a permit to carry a concealed handgun. Keep in mind that we're in Texas.
Aaron: So are you packing right now?
Ms. Tropiak: No! They serve alcohol here!
Hmm... I think Minnesota needs to think about that.
Then Luci, Roy, Aaron, Matt, and Katie jump into Katie's new vehicle and ride around. We see the church with the Blue neon cross on it, and arrive at Coldstone creamery at:
2158h: That means that we have two minutes to eat. We decide not to go there. We drive past El Paso high school, voted one of the top ten scariest buildings in the US. It's an imposing structure and apparently haunted by a cheerleader who committed suicide by jumping off the building. Aaron wanted to buy the building and live there. We head up to a park on the side of the mountain overlooking downtown. I get to talk to Katie for the first time in over three years. When I was in Elementary/Middle/High school, I liked her a lot. Talking to her, I remembered why that was. It's a good thing that she's a long way away from St. Paul and engaged to get married. I think I might end up doing CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education - basically a Hospital Chaplaincy summer assignment for next year) somewhere in the area so I can be at the wedding.
2300: We head back to Roy's House. Katie has to get to work the next morning. We say goodnight and talk for a long time in Roy's back yard, telling Ghost Stories.
Thursday:
0800: Off to Mass again. This time at Blessed Sacrament. Then a quick stop at Cox' bakery to get a Tres Leches cake. Pack up and leave at 1000. Head north on I-25.
1230: Decide to plan our route through Denver.
1500: Stop just south of Santa Fe for lunch. Our cake was cut, but we had nothing to lift the pieces with. I cut a strip from my soda can and we use it as a cake-lifter.
1900: We're in the mountains of Northern New Mexico. It's raining and one of the wiper blades is coming out. We stop to put it back in. An amazing scent is in the air - Pine. Lots of it.
????: Denver
Friday:
0100: Nebraska construction zones are interesting. They are all 2 miles long and have nothing in them. No equipment. No torn up roads. No cones, barrels, barricades, nor flashing lights. Just speed limit reductions for two miles with doubled fines for tickets.
0900: Breakfast in Omaha, Nebraska.
1500: Luch at the Minnesota State line.
1630: Arrive back in the Twin Cities. Find that the Armory is going to be hosting an age of empires game. Play age of empires until 2330h. Sleep till 1000h the next morning.
I, along with a couple other seminarians have just returned from a trip to the City of El Paso, Texas. This is meant to document the trip in some way shape or form. Don't forget to subscribe to the RSS feed.
Saturday, August 6th. 1830h: I wander around St. Thomas and find myself looking at a stained Glass window with the seal of St. Boneventure. I take a practice picture of it with the digital camera that I have recently purchased.
Shortly after, I head to Aaron's apartment, where I lay down for a couple hours of sleep.Sunday, August 7th. 0230h CDT: Aaron and I wake up, and head over to pick up Matt.
0300 CDT: We arrive at the St. Paul Seminary and pick Matt up. Matt had returned from a Central American Tour two days previous. We then depart the twin cities and head for the Sun City - with a few stops along the way.
0630 CDT: We arrive in West Des Moines, Iowa. Matt wakes up. Thinking that we might take advantage of the extra time that we have, we fill up our Gas Tank with the cheapest gas of the trip. Not only was it only $2.14/gal, it was also 90 Octane. This is because in Iowa they add Ethanol to the Gasoline. It is supposed to burn cleaner and also supports the local corn farms. We then head to attend Sunday Mass at the home parish of Noah Beacom, who we have not seen since the day he returned from Rome. Afterward, we go out to breakfast with him. After catching up, we take our leave and continue on the journey. Except that there's one problem - Noah doesn't know how to lead us onto the freeway! We have to drive all around West Des Moines before we find out how to get back on the interstate!
1300h CDT: A stop for Lunch at Sonic in Liberty, Missouri.
1400h CDT: Grr. This is a holdover from last year. Grr = Tollbooth. Unlike the extremely happy tollbooth operators we found in chicago at 0300h last year on our departure, our tollbooth operator is kind and curteous but not nearly as happy as the Chicago men were. She was as friendly as could be expected, but not quite the same as the toll booth operators.
1800h CDT: Arrive at the homestead of the Williamson family. Boy is it weird being in Kansas and yet seeing my family. My mother had literally spent the entire day cooking and had prepared a feast for us. We ate all the olives. Again.
2000h CDT: The neighbor comes over to talk. Apparently she just wanted to meet a real seminarian. She met three.
2100h CDT: Sleep.
Monday, August 8th: 0015h CDT: Wake. I had set three alarms to go off at midnight, but none of them did. Luckily, my internal clock woke me up at 0015h. Had it not, we would have slept till the next morning.
0045 CDT: Depart Kansas. We have a little bit of a hard time finding a place where we can get Gasoline, but eventually we figure it out and head out.
0130 CDT: Aaron makes a wrong turn (actually, the road turned and he missed it), and so we end up driving down a different one. Past a prison. A large prison. With lots of Barbed wire. Aaron doesn't want to stop to turn around, so we take a 30 minute detour on the trip out.
0230 CDT: One strange thing about Kansas and Oklahoma at night is that you see lots of flashing lights on the horizon. Yellowish white ones. They are kind of like the white strobe lights that you sometimes see on top of tall buildings or radio towers, only they are 20 feet off the ground instead of 1,000. Upon asking my father, he explained that it was meant to keep the deer out of the fields. The only problem: there are lots of deer, and lots of fields. The only place that isn't field is the road. That's reassuring... In the meantime, we nearly hit an Armadillo. Shortly thereafter, we join up with US-54, the Highway that I lived on in El Paso during high school.
0400 CDT: We leave Kansas to a sign that says, "You are now leaving Kansas. Please come back soon." Oklahoma doesn't even offer us a greeting! It's terrible. The road, however, is the nicest yet. Two lanes each side, divided and concrete. Not bad at all. Smooth sailing here.
0500 CDT: We cross into the Texas Panhandle! Speed limits of 70 on the US highway.
0600 CDT/0500 MDT: We cross into New Mexico. Things are starting to look a lot more like desert now.
0700 MDT: We take a breakfast break at K-Bob's in Tucumcari, NM (I didn't know that they still existed!). We're now fully in the desert. US-54 now joins Interstate 40. A couple miles more and we're getting our kicks on the Historic Route 66.
1000 MDT: Arrive in Albuquerque. Take a Right turn. Things would have went a lot faster if we had taken a left here.
1100 MDT: Arrive in Santa Fe. "Realize" we should have taken a left. In the meantime, visit the Miraculous Staircase and Cathedral of Santa Fe. We also see this beautiful stained glass window of St. Catherine.Outside, we find two Tractor-Trailers sitting outside the Loretto Chapel. The funny part is the warning signs they have.
Makes me wonder what they were doing in that chapel...1300: Grab a quick lunch and its off to the VLA, Back through Albuquerque on I-25.
1500: A right turn in Socorro, NM.
1630: Arrive at VLA. We are greatly amused by the fact that the VLA is also land that is used by ranchers, and cown wander free over the grounds.
1800: Depart the VLA. Head for El Paso.
2128: Pull into a Subway in Truth or Consequences, NM. Though their lights and sign are on, they are closed says a worker. Great. Decide we can go without dinner or get something in El Paso.
2300: Arrive in El Paso. See my Godmother and her son, Roy for the first time in a couple years. Promptly fall asleep.
Tuesday, 0800: Wake. My Godmother makes breakfast for us. We leave and go to see the Mission Trail. One of the missions was under restoration. The other two were beautiful, though. We see the longest running parish in the US. And the second longest running one. It was founded 10 miles down the road and 1 day later.
1300: Linch at Kiki's, an El Paso landmark.
1500: Visit Scenic Drive and Washington Memorial park and say evening prayer with little kids running all around us.
1600: Head to the Cathedral of St. Patrick.
1700: Mass at the Cathedral. Find out that it's a school mass, since it is just starting. One of the most interesting homilies I've ever seen.
1830: Depart the cathedral after mass and head up and over Trans Mountain road. Ice Cream at Baskin Robbins (yum) and back to my Godmother's house. Sit outside and talk for a good while. Luci (my sister's best friend from High School, my date to Prom Senior year and Roy's Girlfriend as of a couple days after prom) comes over. We talk late.
Wednesday:
0800: Mass at Holy Trinity. See Msgr. Calles, the pastor who has been there since I lived near there.
0900: Depart for Alamogordo.
1030: Visit the Space Musem. See how to fly the space shuttle. Crash it twice before it really lands. Then lunch at Blake's Lotaburger.
1300: Off to White Sands Aaron thinks that it looks like snow and finds himself being careful not to skid on hidden patches of "ice" on the road.
We laugh at him. We find an earless lizard. And fire ants.
1600: Head back to town.
1700: Shower and clean off all the white sand.
1800: Meet my father (who had just come there to take a job at UTEP), Ms. Toni Tropiak (my high school mock trial coach and government/economic teacher) and Katie Maguire at the Great American Land and Cattle Company. Eat the BEST steak I've had in a VERY long time. Ms. Tropiak gives us a talk about how she just got a permit to carry a concealed handgun. Keep in mind that we're in Texas.
Aaron: So are you packing right now?
Ms. Tropiak: No! They serve alcohol here!
Hmm... I think Minnesota needs to think about that.
Then Luci, Roy, Aaron, Matt, and Katie jump into Katie's new vehicle and ride around. We see the church with the Blue neon cross on it, and arrive at Coldstone creamery at:
2158h: That means that we have two minutes to eat. We decide not to go there. We drive past El Paso high school, voted one of the top ten scariest buildings in the US. It's an imposing structure and apparently haunted by a cheerleader who committed suicide by jumping off the building. Aaron wanted to buy the building and live there. We head up to a park on the side of the mountain overlooking downtown. I get to talk to Katie for the first time in over three years. When I was in Elementary/Middle/High school, I liked her a lot. Talking to her, I remembered why that was. It's a good thing that she's a long way away from St. Paul and engaged to get married. I think I might end up doing CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education - basically a Hospital Chaplaincy summer assignment for next year) somewhere in the area so I can be at the wedding.
2300: We head back to Roy's House. Katie has to get to work the next morning. We say goodnight and talk for a long time in Roy's back yard, telling Ghost Stories.
Thursday:
0800: Off to Mass again. This time at Blessed Sacrament. Then a quick stop at Cox' bakery to get a Tres Leches cake. Pack up and leave at 1000. Head north on I-25.
1230: Decide to plan our route through Denver.
1500: Stop just south of Santa Fe for lunch. Our cake was cut, but we had nothing to lift the pieces with. I cut a strip from my soda can and we use it as a cake-lifter.
1900: We're in the mountains of Northern New Mexico. It's raining and one of the wiper blades is coming out. We stop to put it back in. An amazing scent is in the air - Pine. Lots of it.
????: Denver
Friday:
0100: Nebraska construction zones are interesting. They are all 2 miles long and have nothing in them. No equipment. No torn up roads. No cones, barrels, barricades, nor flashing lights. Just speed limit reductions for two miles with doubled fines for tickets.
0900: Breakfast in Omaha, Nebraska.
1500: Luch at the Minnesota State line.
1630: Arrive back in the Twin Cities. Find that the Armory is going to be hosting an age of empires game. Play age of empires until 2330h. Sleep till 1000h the next morning.
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