USA Tour 2011 – Part Three

Hello again, people of the webworld! This is part the third of the Libera Summer Tour blog! It has been a fair few days since the last blog update, so here we go…

The day after our Chicago sightseeing was a travel day to St. Louis, Missouri. So we spent most of the day in our beloved coach (or car, bus, or whatever is your version of the big elongated car that can hold a lot of people and luggage). As road trips go, this wasn’t so bad. We were all just “chilling” in the coach – literally, as the difference in temperature outside and inside the coach were astronomical! Some of us slept in there, others watched a film, and most of us were playing on DS or PSP consoles. What a cluster of noise we have on coach journeys! Nothing like the sound in our concerts, rest assured!

Wednesday was a slightly more eventful day. In the morning we went to Grant’s Farm, a lovely – well, farm – with lots of different animals. We saw deer, elephants, bald eagles (America’s mascot – and they aren’t actually bald!) giant turtles and camels, one of which we managed to feed without being spat on! But probably the most memorable attraction in that place was the baby goat pen. You could buy loads of bottles of milk to feed them with, and once you got into the pen, at least ten goats would crowd around you to get at the bottles! It was all very good fun; Liam had three at once, and we all thought the goats, which went crazy the moment they saw a plentiful supply of milk, were attacking him!

Anyway, after that fun morning, we went to perform in St. Louis’ Basilica. What a beautiful building. There are so many mosaics on the ceiling it’s astonishing! The effort that went into piecing all those little glass shards together to make the huge mosaics is astounding; they used to think they had the biggest quantity of these glass bits in the Western hemisphere – until the Vatican kindly pointed out that they had a few more! Although St. Louis’ Basilica can still boast that it has the largest amount on the ceiling – for that is where all the mosaics are found, nowhere else. The concert itself went really well, and because the basilica is so large there was a huge delay in sound, making the music even more ethereal. One really fun thing was that we surprised the audience at the beginning of the second half by placing the older boys in a gallery way higher up above the stage for ‘Te Lucis’.

It was really funny to watch all these heads turn to look and see where the sound was coming from. Afterwards we did our first signing of the tour, which was really fun. It even surprises us to see how fast we can write our autographs!

Thursday was another day spent travelling. However, in the morning we went to the pool for about an hour. The water was so refreshing in the heat! Anyhow, after that we started our drive to Frisco. In fact, it was so far away that we had to spread the journey over two days! What a trek! So, we started it, and we had to stop in Arkansas for the night. There are so many locusts in that part of the world it’s unreal.

Everywhere we looked there would be some sort of insect, be it giant butterfly or tiny moth. But even Ben managed to over come his “insectophobia” for the night, for our motel was very cushy. But the next day, straight after breakfast, we continued our voyage to Texas. Although we did stop off once to look at a really cool, Wild West type town. It was really cool – it would have made it even more real had Clint Eastwood appeared out of nowhere in a poncho to have a shoot-out! 

Tune in next time for the next instalment of the Summer Tour Blog…