Day 19 - Our Last Full Day

We said good-bye to our wonderful host families...hopefully regular and email addresses were exchanged. I know Maria and I promised to keep in touch - which we have!
We all met at the GAIA Foundation to do volunteer work on an environmental service project. We also had a tour of some indigenous plants. It was HOT by now...but most of us survived pretty well.



As you can see from this photo, Shaylin and Emily were two of the cooks who helped prepare our organic lunch. We sat out on covered picnic tables overlooking the Mediterranean. Afterwards, we were able to walk down to the sandy beach of Golden Sands and taking one last swim in the Mediterranean. Some of us didn't go, but stayed up in a restaurant and had some of our last gelato...played some cards...checked some email...and just visited. It was SO HOT...and there was NO SHADE at all at the beach. This beach was absolutely beautiful.

Something I had been looking forward to seeing in Malta were their buses. The traditional city buses look so retro! They are classic buses from the 1950's, 60's and 70's. They are painted bright yellow,white,and orange.


Our next stop was the town of Mosta and the Parish Church of Santa Maria...commonly called the Mosta Dome. This church is fairly new...built between 1833 - 1860. It has a beautiful blue, gold, and white interior...but it's famous for a bomb that fell through the dome in 1942. On June 9, 1942, during World War II, three enemy bombs hit the Mosta Dome while it had people inside (about 300) waiting for mass to begin. Two of these bombs bounced off and landed without exploding and the third went through the dome, smashed off a wall, and rolled across the floor of the church! It is a miracle that it did not detonate and no one was hurt!



Remember the limbo???

From the Mosta Dome, we headed to our last stop of the day...Badger Karting. Here, everyone that wanted to, had a 6 minute practice run to get use to the go-kart and the track. After every group had done this, then we raced again for the qualifying session. From this, the top 8 times raced in the final race. Some were quite competitive...some not so competitive! I think a LOT of fun was had by everyone.





The winners were: 1st-Omar 2nd-Twiggy 3rd-Jason


By the time we got to our hotel, there wasn't much time until dinner. Our last dinner was our 'formal affair.' Not truly FORMAL, but most people put on something a little nicer. It was our last meal all together...


One last good-bye from your leaders....I think we all felt the same, that we couldn't have asked for a better group of high school delegates to travel on the "Heart of the Mediterranean" with.

Wow, the end of our trip is here...one that we planned for so long! It's hard to believe it is the end of Day 19!