Day 5 - The great Jubilee/Benedictine/48-state Pilgrimage of 2025!

 So, after a night of no sleep (see the bells in the previous post) I woke up thinking, "Oh, my, what did we do? We still have another week!" Luckily, after waking up at morning prayer and having the most delightful, elderly monk walk by after and say "Breakfast" it was hard to stay grumpy.

After breakfast was Sunday Mass. I don't believe I've ever attended Sunday Mass in a monastery choir before. It is a unique and wonderful experience (and you get a front row seat because the Abbot gives his homily from the back of the sanctuary). This homily was so very appropriate. From Luke:" You also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come." 

Father Abbot spoke about travel and perseverance and what happens when you get to the end of the map...there was a story about warfare and soldiers from the front sending word to HQ to tell them "we've reached the end of the map." (Still wasn't awake enough for long-term memory storage!)Yes, we had our Google machine to provide the car's direction but there would be several times over the course of the week that we would run out of map. All thanks to God for this homily to remind us to keep walking His way before we resumed our journey.

I was grateful that the travel planner made it another, somewhat, short driving day (that's 7+ hours instead of 10 - these are BIG states). I have to pause and withdraw a bit of shade from my previous Nebraska post...the road from Richardton, ND into Montana was not even a road. Grateful it was Sunday with few travelers, we did the best we could. We came away with only a broken heat shield so we consider that a win.

We had entered "Big Sky" country and they're not kidding. That is the road ahead at the bottom right of the photo.

It seems there was an ocean here once? I really must get better at geography.

I actually enjoyed this day's sunset...from the porch of our house.

We had made it to Great Falls! DH and I spent some time working out where to get the car repaired in the morning and we had a good in-house dinner for a change. After that, the kids watched some tv (monasteries are missing those!) and we all prayed and went to bed. The morning would bring a much shorter travel day, some once-in-a-lifetime sights, and a pretty cool space to lodge overnight. 

We are blessed!