come holy spirit

After many delays and cancellations, today was the day we finally got to celebrate our Joseph's Confirmation. In his preparation, he taught us this prayer...

Oh Holy Spirit, beloved of my soul, I adore you. Enlighten me, guide me, strengthen me, console me. Tell me what I should do. Give me your orders. I promise to submit myself to all the you desire of me, and accept all that you permit to happen to me. Let me only know your will. Amen. 

Big, brave words. But in the learning and the doing, Joe is showing us that he is also big and brave. What more will he do, now with the gifts of the Holy Spirit. 

a story about pie

I love pie. 

that drive

Okay well, here we go. Thirty-one hours of driving stretch out before us, but we're going to try to take them slower than we did on our trip to Saskatchewan. So here's how we got from Point A to Point B...

Well, we actually weren't on the road for very long before we had
our first stop... picnic lunch with Mac the Moose in Moose Jaw. 

Wait - no - lunch with this guy and his friends in Moose Jaw. 

Papa would be so mad at us if he could see what is happening right now. 

Onward. Stopped again at the Saskatchewan/Manitoba border. Apropos to the slogan, there was a lightening storm going on around me when we turned in to take this farewell to Saskatchewan picture. 

This series of photos is called "Bedhead in Winnipeg."
Leo slept very hard in our luxurious hotel room in Winnipeg. 

Then on to the English Garden in Winnipeg's Assiniboine Park for a bit of walking around and dancing with statues. 

Now it's lunch time just outside of Kenora.
This time, we ate with float planes and not gophers. 

And into late evening, we took hot and tired and grumpy people
and threw them in a lake. Just the refresher we needed.
Although, in retrospect, it may have been wiser to (1) eat supper
and (2) keep on driving. This detour meant getting into Thunder Bay
around midnight, where we picked up our Dominos pizza
and headed to the hotel room for a pizza party that our neighbours
did not enjoy. Oh well. Lessons learned.  

Another day, another body of water. I don't even know where this is.
I just know we stopped here because somebody needed
to go the bathroom and this spot (1) was pretty and (2) had a porta-potty.

The Kantors at a waterfall! The Aguasabon Falls, to be exact. 

Comes complete with a gorge. 

Lunch stop and swim. We are in Neys Provincial Park to
refuel (eat) but also to burn fuel (run around). 

The bridge at Nipagon.

We live in a beautiful country. Drive across it! I recommend it!

Old Woman Bay, along Lake Superior! Nobody really needed to stop here,
but we did because I was the one driving and it all looked so pretty and
why not get out to run around the beach and take pictures.
And, fun fact, this picture of Jane was taken right before she told me
she buried her flip flops in the sand and couldn't remember where. 

Our hotel stays went rapidly downhill from luxurious to functional.
The Bel Air Motel in Sault Ste Marie may have lacked the glamour and pizzazz
of our Winnipeg stay but it did have all the beds we needed
and conveniently located waste disposal 

And now we're on a ferry! We took a slightly different route home that
went through the Manitoulin Islands that included this ferry ride.
'Twas a bit windy and chilly but a nice two-ish hour break from driving for me and David. 

And then all of a sudden it was 10 p.m. and we were driving through Guelph
so we stopped at the Flahertys to use their bathroom and eat all their cookies
and dance around their house. It was just the break that we needed because,
five minutes after we left, this is what the inside of our van looked like...

And then we were home. Just like that. I don't know how we did it, with these little, restless bodies strapped into their seats for hours and hours at a time while we wound up the long ribbony road ahead of us. But we did it. And we would do it all over again.