The King and Mayo

I was reminded once again on my walk home from working out how extraordinary of a place Mayo is. Most of the time I get caught up in our lives here and forget how blessed we are to be here. However, when you see the streets blocked off by cop cars and more than 15 cars, a mixture of police cars, unmarked police suburbans, limos, BMW's and other nice cars, in a motorcade to the Kahler Hotel, you remember that people from all over the world come here to get the excellent health care that we have at our finger tips! The king of Saudi Arabia is here right now to receive treatment and this is the routine that they go through every time he goes from his hotel, where he reserves all of the rooms on the floor for his entourage of 400 people, to the hospital and back...what a life. I stopped on my walk home to observe this as I haven't seen it before and it was pretty amazing. I have also heard that his daughters, two princesses, don't get along so when they are here together, one princess gets one floor of the hotel and the other princess gets another floor and they don't want to see each other! I also know that they bring their own chefs who take over a part of the hotel's kitchen to prepare food for the king and his family...pretty crazy. I also just found this article in our local newspaper about them renting tons of Uhaul's to bring everything they bought while they were here to the airport (aka - the picture below): http://www.postbulletin.com/newsmanager/templates/localnews_story.asp?z=2&a=371702 Maybe I witnessed them getting ready to leave for the airport instead since it was a little before 9pm when I walked by?!?
Anyway, I have been meaning to post this for awhile now and since it kind of goes with this post, here is a great article on Mayo that my supervisor sent us:
http://takingnote.tcf.org/2008/10/what-makes-the.html
We feel so blessed to be a part of Mayo and really don't realize what an amazing place it is until we read things like this or see things like I saw tonight!

Brandon is doing a "ride along" on the ambulance tonight as part of his EM rotation...maybe he got to be in the ambulance that was in the line of cars choffering the king?!? Probably not, but that would have been fun. I asked someone (yes, I am just like my mom!) why an ambulance goes along and he said it is just in case the king is shot or something happens to him... I wonder if the cops got nervous as I stood there in my black down coat with my hood up and holding my mace! ;)

Apparently I have been in my own world recently as this has been in the news for awhile! After I wrote the above, I found some more articles on the king and the following pictures:

Two private 747 Jets
(http://www.postbulletin.com/newsmanager/templates/localnews_story.asp?z=7&a=371523)Beamers in a motorcade
(http://www.postbulletin.com/newsmanager/templates/localnews_story.asp?z=2&a=371358)