We all left from the Church parking lot this afternoon, sent on our way by a wonderful crowd of wellwishers, parents, and prayer partners.

After a brief ceremony, we were all presented with shells as the symbols of being pilgrims (as usual this seemed to have something to do with getting more beer and whisky as we travel). Interestingly enough, my parents (who will be meeting us in Glasgow to take Calum off our hands) are often seen sporting a similar shell following their bicycle pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and Terry (our priest who is traveling with us) used to work at St. James’ in West Hartford. Small World.

It was Bryan’s job to get us the bus and it duly turned up (let’s hope my bus does as well on Thursday to take us to Stirling).

A word or two about how I hope to keep folks in touch with our progress as we go…

I won’t have my computer with me (as I do now) but I have been told that there is a computer in the office where we are staying that I will be able to use to write posts and hopefully post pictures too.

If I can I will be posting photos to my Flickr account. The easiest way to get there is just to click on one of the pictures in a post.

We’d love to hear from you, you can leave comments on any of the posts and I will relay them onto the group. In order to leave a comment you need to register (there’s a link at the bottom of the right hand column). After you are logged in you’ll be able to comment on any post by clicking on the Comments link at the bottom of it. Your post may not show up right away as I usually need to approve someone’s first comment. I have to jump through all these hoops just to avoid yucky comment spam.

If for some reason you can’t get that to work or you don’t want to share your comments with the rest of Therapville (this is primarily my work blog) and the word you can always send an email to stpaulspilgrimage@gmail.com and I will do my best to pick up those messages every day.

Thanks for all your thoughts and prayers. Happy reading.

:: Justin ::

UPDATE:

We made it on our first leg and are gathering at Gate 86 in Newark Airport waiting to get on the plane.  Everything (apart from the straps on my backpack) has held together quite nicely (Iona‘s pun).  There was a very nice lady at the Continental check in who got all 15 of us through very quickly.  We’re currently operating on Debbie’s theory that as long as we arrive with the right number of people, it is less important that they are the same people we left with :-)
See you in Scotland!