Trapped by the Marathon!

If ever there was a good excuse for being late for church, I sure had one today. While we live a mere five minute drive from church, it took us thirty minutes to get there today, because we were trapped by the OKC Memorial Marathon route. Don't misunderstand, I love the marathon, the fact that it goes by our building, and I hope to someday participate, but in years past we didn't have this problem. It seems like the last several years the weather has been bad, and so it wasn't that difficult to cross through the people who braved the weather. Today, however, the weather was absolutely gorgeous, so I wonder if the turnout was significantly higher than usual, making our travels more difficult.

In the below picture (taken from my bedroom window), church is less than a mile on the other side of the line of people. Yes, there are breaks between the people, but between the people and cars, we had a heck of a time getting through this year.



To further illustrate just how close church is, here's a picture I took a couple years ago from my living room window.



So you're thinking, find an alternate route, right? Well, easier said than done. If you take a look at this map from the marathon website, we are completely inside the course. And we did try to find another way to go, with little success. We drove up and down the side streets for at least fifteen minutes, looking for a good place to cross through, but even so, we were very late to church.



I really do love the marathon. It's neat to watch it from the window. I just need to figure out a better way to handle this next year. Probably we should go to Our Lady of Perpetual Help for mass on marathon weekend, since it is inside the marathon route also, instead of St. Francis, which is not. That wouldn't have worked today since we didn't plan ahead for this difficulty, as mass at St. Francis is at 8:30, and mass at Our Lady is at 8:00 (and we left for mass after 8:00). Next year I will keep this in mind.