Every saint is in charge of something. Jude looks over hopeless cases and policemen. Anthony takes a look out for animals. For the unindoctrinated, think of it like this: Saints all have very specific super powers.

Saint Tupin-Upon-Avon is an obscure saint. Tupin-Upon-Avon is in charge of Americans who do not pay attention when they travel to foreign countries. I have become connected to St. Tupin-Upon-Avon because she has seen me through a few scrapes, most recently at the Victoria Butterfly Garden.

You see, in order to get to the Victoria Butterfly Gardens, you need to take a bus. Without bogging you down in the details about my experience, let’s just say I didn’t so a good job of paying attention to the bus schedule.

We toured the gardens leisurely spending just over an hour among the lush, green foliage and the colorful insects.

Now here’s where my personal patron saint comes into play. I figured that this bus, like all buses runs every fifteen minutes. Wrong! It runs every hour. We just missed the departing bus and our reward was fifty-five minutes in the warm Victoria sunlight.

Thankfully, after a few prayers to the patron saint of American dumbasses, she sent a bus along so we could enjoy a few hours in Victoria.

Portrait of the artist waiting on a bus.