One Week to Go!

One week from today Beth and I begin our adventure in earnest. This morning the Christ Lutheran Church Chamber Choir rehearsed "Deep and Precious, Strong and Gracious" in preparation for singing it in worship tomorrow. This is a Tord Gustavsen arrangement of an old Scandinavian hymn "Dype Stille Sterke Milde". The song has come together nicely and I look forward to presenting tomorrow. Rehearsing this song this morning was a nice prelude to our trip to Europe, as this arrangement is a combination of something traditional and contemporary, something spiritual and sensuous. This is what I hope our pilgrimage will be, a mixture of all these elements.

This past week we have started getting finalized details from our trip, for example earlier this week we picked up our Globus package tour material from Laurie at Marlin Travel. She went through all the material with us, and gave us some helpful hints to get us on our way. It was exciting to see more details of our package tour, and it is looking great. I also have heard from Ron Brind of C.S. Lewis Tours with some updates about our tour to C.S. Lewis sites in and around Oxford - and Mr. Brind let us know that we will be able to get inside The Kilns, the Lewis home for most of his adult life. Another email this past week was from The London Symphony Orchestra saying the conductor for the concert we are planning to attend is no longer available due to health concerns, but fortunately for us, the performance we have tickets for is going ahead with a different conductor, whereas another date was simply cancelled.

Many people have been giving us travel advice, and we appreciate all of it... but it's almost getting overwhelming. So much to remember - it's hard to keep it all straight. In the end I'm sure we'll forget some helpful information at some point, but I'm also sure that we will be fine in Europe regardless, even if everything doesn't go perfectly.

I have set Monday as my primary packing day, the day I put together my luggage - at least the first attempt. Then I will need to figure out what I really need to take, and what can be left behind. Today I am wearing the pair of shoes I plan to use as my primary shoes in Europe - and I will see how my feet feel after having them on all day. Last week I bought a suit jacket (so I can get into the opera at Milan), this was purchased at Value Village for $30, that way if it gets wrecked on the trip it won't be a big loss (this was Beth's suggestion and it makes a lot of sense to me).

Today the temperature finally got close to 20 degrees Celsius here in Regina, which I am glad about for many reasons, particularly so when we hit the warmer temperatures of southern Europe it won't be such a shock to our systems. Rome has been having temperatures around 30 degrees lately, and going from frost warnings here to that kind of heat there will be a big shift.

Seven days is all that remains, then we'll be on a plane, flying past Spain to the Italian terrain, then soon we board the train, and off to Milan come shine or rain... okay that's enough warping of "My Fair Lady" - which reminds me that I need to write a post about the West End Show we will be seeing in London, but I'll save that for later this week.