Today my family and I went into Worcester to get our follow-up Japanese encephalitis (JE) vaccinations for our departure. Perfect timing! President Barack Obama was in town! Fortunately, traffic wasn’t heavy so we were able to get the job done. When we arrived at the medical center there was 15 minute wait ready for us, because the nurses had not yet received the JE from the pharmacy. After I had been taken care of, my parents went to get their vaccinations.

Since we were near my mom’s workplace, and she had some things to finish up, we visited her campus at the College of Holy Cross. My dad, mom, and I entered an exhibit that had just opened in the Cantor Gallery called ‘Our Fragile Home’. It is about the fact that even though Earth seems to be so big to humanity, it is so small compared to the rest of existence. It was inspired by a meeting held in 1990, where astronauts from different countries and cultures explained their emotions and what they saw as they experienced our world from a different angle. All astronauts, though they couldn’t understand each other’s dialects, said roughly the same thing using the words beauty, sustain, harmony, nurture, steward, protect, fragile, and balance.

Lunch plans crumbled as we approached our destination, a new restaurant on Shrewsbury Street. Mom thought it was open for lunch, but it was only open for supper. My parents informed me that there will be things like this that we cannot control on our trip. We will have to be flexible, but in this case we just picked another restaurant.