Days 225-230: Goodbye, EST (4/18-4/23/21)

I love early morning drives. I always get a burst of energy whenever I drive before 6am, it typically means there is a long, exciting day ahead of me. Driving Andrew to the airport so he could return home to Reno, though, was a tough way to start out the morning. Plus, the day was very non-eventful, since it is only a travel day from here in Huntersville, NC, just outside of Charlotte, to Decatur, GA, just outside of Atlanta. We went to morning mass at St. Mark's, had team prayer, ate lunch, cleaned the rectory, then drove through the Carolinas for one last time. There is a sign leaving the airport claiming North Carolina as, "the best state to drive through", which is very hard to argue against for both North and South Carolina. I'm definitely going to miss it. We arrived in Decatur, and met with Michele and Terry, who bought us hotel rooms for the night, at a BBQ restaurant. Michele was a former youth minister that hosted NET for years, and though she left the position a couple years ago, she still loves NET, and was generous enough to keep us in Decatur. The beauty of NET connections. In the hotel that night, we celebrated Luke's birthday, since we cannot celebrate it together on his actual birthday, July 5th. We wrote him affirmation notes and watched the Mandalorian as a team, since he is a massive Star Wars fan. . . We woke up early the next morning and spent the morning a local park doing ministry prep. We did team prayer (praise and worship) outside under a pavilion, which was extremely liberating, then played 8-trapezoids. What is 8-trapezoids? It's 9-square, but there was an outlined pattern in the shape of 8 trapezoids underneath the pavilion that we used to play as lines, which turned out to be very fun and refreshing. Once finished, we packed up and drove all afternoon down the I-85 to Fort Walton Beach, Florida. We spent the night in split host homes, but the guys all stayed with the Beaty family. They had their two youngest sons home, and we spent all evening playing card games and laughing our butts off. One of the boys, Aiden, showed off some music he produced on his laptop. He dreams to be an EDM producer, and he showed me how to use music-producing software. Hard to follow, but I definitely would love to get into it, especially now that I am using my musical inclination a lot more. He definitely inspired me, and I greatly appreciated it. . . I had my weekly day off today, this time with Sarah. Since we were in different host homes, we decided not to meet up until 10am so she could sleep in and do her thing, while I dropped off the team and took the van. I had to run a few errands anyway, including getting a haircut, so it worked out well. I picked her up, and we went to a beach on the gulf coast, and walked along the water for over an hour. It was beautiful; the water was clear, and the sand was white. Sarah is one of the teammates that I have had a tougher time getting to know, not because we don't like each other, but because we are literally opposite people, and have gravitated towards other teammates. This semester, though, we have worked really hard for our friendship, and it has certainly paid dividends, and conversing while walking on the beach definitely helped. After walking down the coast, we went out to eat lunch and watch The Chosen, then returned to pick up the team from the retreat site for another quick turnaround. We packed up retreat supplies, and drove back to Metairie, LA for our second retreat at Archbishop Rummel High School, where we were a couple weeks ago. We ate Popeyes for dinner and watched dance videos, spending quality time with each other since we know there isn't much left. . . The second group of 9th grade Rummel students were a bit different than the first group. They had a TON of energy, but were not too focused on retreat, yet were still very curious about the faith. Sounds frustrating, but it happens, I had a good time leading the retreat. We stayed a couple hours after retreat to do ministry prep and wait for Andrew's plane to land in New Orleans. I told you he would be back. Once we picked him up from the Louis Armstrong Airport, we took off for New Roads, Louisiana, for what will be the most interesting two days of ministry in a while. . . Grace had the day off, so I was flying this crazy plane all by myself. We were not doing a retreat, but rather presentations for all 10 religion classes at Catholic High of Pointe Coupee in New Roads. There were 5 periods, with 2 classes per period grades 7-11, hence we broke up into two different groups, while mixing up the groups throughout the day. We scheduled each presentation with the same parts, but different people for each class. It was confusing, and certainly chaotic at points, but we figured it out. Shoutout to Samantha for helping me with scheduling. We had a chill evening at the girls host home, where we ate dinner and watched more Mandalorian. The guys went home pretty late to our lake house, but it was so worth it. . . Our last day at Pointe Coupee was putting on a retreat for the junior class, which was super hype. The guys on retreat were so much fun, and although I was having an unusually tough day, I had a good time with the youth. Also, some of the kids got stuck in an elevator because there were 14 students in when the max was 6. That was funny. When we returned home, we celebrated Katherine's summer birthday! We decided for Kat, a Hamilton fan, to recreate the opening scene of the Hamilton musical as a team, which turned out beautiful. Apparently, a couple months prior, her and a couple other girls casted the whole team for certain roles, so we went with her casting and absolutely KILLED it! We mimicked each part on the TV displaying the scene, and it worked really well. Since Samuel was casted as Alexander Hamilton, the scene was dubbed "Alexander Samilton". Absolutely iconic. I love my team.