Making progress with plans

Here it is, Thanksgiving Day weekend, and plans are progressing for the Sabbatical. We applied with Christian Peacemaker Teams for the delegation to Israel/Palestine from March 4-17. That was a bit of a scary experience. Though we know CPT policy about working in dangerous areas of the world, it was driven home for us when we put our names on the line, making it clear we did not want violence to be used to "save" us if we were apprehended in some way, and did not want retribution if we were injured or were killed. It was also a wake up call for us in terms of physical demands. We wrote CPT as we applied that Loretta, while healthy, did not have a lot of stamina, and CPT encouraged us strongly to work on that, so Loretta and I have been walking a lot more the last weeks, and I see her continue to gain strength.
We have also applied for passports, and pretty much finalized a daily schedule for the four months we will be gone. So these days I am in the process of contacting a travel agency for checking out flights for all our air travel. This last week I also contacted Nazareth Village, a recreation of First Century Nazareth in which Mennonite Mission Network personnel are involved in Israel, to see about visiting there and making Nazareth Village our center for a couple of days in Galilee.
Of course, good wrinkles still reshape our plans continually. This week we heard quite serendipitously from good friends of ours in the Netherlands--she a Dutch teammate of ours from our years in Iraklion, Crete, and he her Greek husband. She had heard about our trip to Greece this winter, and since she and her husband spend some time in Greece with his aged parents, she wanted to be sure we would come to their village in Central Greece for a visit. We hadn't planned to travel that direction, but now we are trying to revise plans to include that also, as these relationships from the past are still very vital for us and indeed a part of the reason we want to travel to Greece.
We covet prayers as we continue to formulate our plans these days. Many of you at church are expressing your pleasure that we have this opportunity, and that is encouraging for us.
Roy