Thursday was a long day. The major plan for the day was to participate in two live television broadcasts on EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network) which is the Catholic cable channel. It's worldwide and also streams on the web. And, this was the purpose of being in Birmingham.
I've been to Alabama four times counting this current trip. My first visit was in 2005. Alabama was the first state I visited outside of the Northeast. It was also the cause of my first commercial flight. I went with a group to EWTN. I last visited Alabama and EWTN in Spring, 2008.
The Mass is broadcast at 7am Central Time (in Eastern Time, it's 8am). In order to be on television, you must arrive around 6:20am. Otherwise, you risk having to go to the "overflow area" and will not be on camera. Since the hotel was six miles away from EWTN's studio, I didn't want to take chances. I decided we had to leave by 5:45am. I woke up at 4:30am and I think I was so excited over visiting EWTN again that I did not get much sleep. At most, I had two hours of sleep. I was totally exhausted for most of the day. I'm glad I didn't have to drive six hours that day as I typically do on one of these trips.
When we arrived at EWTN, there were very few people in the Chapel. It's a small Chapel and there is not a lot of room. But it's been packed on my two previous trips. Staff are always there, but even they don't fill it. They need visitors to fill it so the broadcast does not show a lot of empty pughs. As Dan and I were two of the three younger people present, a staff member sincerely thanked us for showing up.
The GPS wasn't great in getting us there. Dan had been there on Wednesday so he remembered the way. But getting us out of the studio and back to the hotel was a real mess. The GPS took us through a bunch of neighborhoods when a couple of turns in another direction would have immediately brought us to I-20.
Breakfast at the hotel was very nice. It included nice southern food, except it was missing one of the most important things: grits. Still, there was enough of everything else that the grits weren't missed.
After resting a bit, we decided to go up north to Hanceville, Alabama. This is where the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament is located. The Shrine is frequently promoted by EWTN, and some shows are taped at the Shrine, but they are not officially connected. Mother Angelica (founder of EWTN) had the Shrine built, but she is not officially connected to EWTN anymore, except to be remembered as its founder.
When we left, I told Dan to take all of his things out of the hotel room since the maids had not been through yet. Even if things were not valuable to him, they could get thrown away. He decided to take the risk, and even left his laptop there thinking it was so old that nobody would steal it.... I should have remembered, and reminded him, that nobody would care about selling his laptop. They would just want it to see if they could get information out of it to steal his identity.
Our first stop was Our Lady's Grotto. This is run by Benedictine monks and contains minitature sculptures of various scenes from Biblical and Catholic history. The brother who did the sculptures worked on them from the late 1930s to the early 1960s when he died. The sculptures are left outside, and surprisingly enough, there is very little detereoration due to weather. I visited the Grotto in 2005 on my first trip to Alabama. There was a new carving (done by someone else, of course) made in 2009. I'll have pictures up soon.
After the Grotto, we visited the Shrine itself. Dan was amazed as this was his first ever visit. The Shrine is gorgeous. It was built in 1999, but was done in the style of an older church. The materials all look modern, but they are done tastefully and in intricate detail. Five families donated to build the Shrine, on condition that they remain anonymous forever.
We met the priest and young women who were going to appear on the EWTN show Life on the Rock later that evening. They came from Nebraska and were touring the Shrine when we were there.
We also saw the gift shop, which looks like a castle and has medeval suits of armor. There are statues of St. Michael the Arcangel and St. Joan of Arc, each dressed in armor. Dan was amazed at all of these things. (I was too when I first saw it five years ago.)
Hanceville is about an hour from Birmingham. It's not directly off I-65. The GPS took us through the countryside getting back to Birmingham. But, we saw some nice scenery.
We had enough time for a quick dinner and then had to get back to EWTN for the broadcast of Life on the Rock. We each reserved a seat in the audience ahead of time. However, it wouldn't have mattered because there were not that many people in the audience. We could have just walked in right before the show started and still been given seats.
On some EWTN shows, the camera pans the audience. On Life on the Rock, they don't. The only contribution the audience makes is to clap at the breaks and beginning/end of the show. It was interesting watching the broadcast. It's a very small set and there is only one studio (outside of the Chapel where the Mass is broadcast). So, for each show they must keep switching the backgrounds and furniture. Breaks are done in order to adjust equipment and move guests around. In this case, there were several young women and each one had to have a chance to be on screen, so they would switch during breaks. There is a large television on the side so you can see exactly what the viewers are seeing (complete with credits, names, web addresses, and other wording placed on the screen while people are talking). I kept turning my head to watch what people saw vs. seeing the people right in front of me.
When we got back around 8:30pm or 9, the hotel room was truly cleaned out. All of Dan's things were gone. He went to the desk and was told that it was being held somewhere because they thought we checked out and left it. The clerk did not have the keys to the room where it was kept so he would have to get it in the morning.
We had originally planned to attend the broadcast Mass again on Friday morning. But we were both so exhausted from getting up so early that we decided to skip it. It was too much to get up at 4:30am again. In my case, I knew I couldn't do that after having only two hours of sleep the night before.
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