Wednesday, August 15

The Group!

The journey to CLAY has started!! 

We gathered together last night at the Cathedral in Kamloops. The bus had started yesterday morning on the lower mainland and brought to Kamloops friends from Victoria and Vancouver. The Montreal group who has been in the Kamloops area since Friday got back to the Cathedral in time for dinner.

Our friends from Hills of Peace Lutheran Church made us a delicious dinner of lasagna, ceasar salad, bread and ice cream and berries for dessert! Thanks so much to Alana, Lisa, Rae and their team! The rest of the evening was spent getting to know one another with games and conversations. There was much laughter as the groups all mixed together and started to become one.

Loading the bus to leave Kamloops

We had a check-in in our Home Team groups and then gathered together for a simple but powerful worship service before heading off to get ready for bed. It didn’t take long for everyone to fall asleep for the night.

Morning started by 7am… some of us had the good fortune of being up earlier. By 8:30am (only 30 minutes after the anticipated departure time) we headed out of Kamloops and started our journey to Calgary.

We are traveling on a fabulous bus with an amazing driver! The comfort of this bus is making the trip feel easy and enjoyable. We have comfy seats with lots of space, a DVD player (so the movies have been non-stop), bathroom and of course air-conditioning. Oh – thank goodness for air-conditioning.

Lunch stop in Golden

We had a stretch break at the Last Spike – Craigellachie and our lunch stop in Golden. Our lunches are “make your own sandwich” style with a lot of teamwork for the prep and the clean-up.

I am happy to report that the day of bus travel went very smoothly and we arrived at St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Calgary right on schedule. We were greeted by some friends: Jill, Chad and Aaron who fed us and amazing taco dinner with ice cream sundae’s for dessert. Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you!!

Dinner at St. Peter's

As I finish typing this we are all getting ready for bed… our goal for tomorrow is to leave the church by 6am so we can get to Saskatoon for the start of CLAY. Yep, that means a 5am wake-up call. Can we do it?! Yes we can!!

It's time to mentally prepare to enter a very flat part of Canada... goodbye beautiful mountains!