Keryn and I have a long term dream to live in the Holy Land for a year or two. As part of the "auditioning" process, we are planning a two-week trip. We're shooting for Fall, 2010. That gives us a good two years to plan, prepare, and save money.
We hope the trip will give us time to see the highlights and give us a feel for what it would be like to have our family there. We'd like to invite any of you that are interested to come with us on this two-week journey. I plan to invite Keryn's family to participate also.
I haven't a clue how much it will cost and we don't have a set itinerary yet. We want to see places that are important for Old and New Testament History (Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Galilee), as well as the history of civilization in general (Jericho, Caesarea and other Roman stuff, Dead Sea Scrolls Museum). We also want to see places that are important parts of the current political world over there (Holocaust Museum, Western Wall, Dome of the Rock). It will be a whirlwind trip.
I think the Gillelands are thinking about going over there in the near future. Some others of you might also have plans to go sometime. If you don't already have something in mind, I hope you'll consider going with us.
We want to do a bunch of preparation before we go. We're going to read some important books on the ancient and current world. We're going to write up field trip guides for each site we plan to visit. We want to frame the whole trip as the filming of a documentary. We'll interview each other and take video of the various sites and then edit it all together when we get home. It will largely be for a family keepsake of the event, but it would be fun to post a version online as well.
I expect that most of you won't want to--or be able to--participate. However, if you'd like to do it, it would be fun to work together on the preparation for the trip. We could read the various books at the same time and we could divide up assignments for reports on different locations. We could share all of that online in a new blog if enough people are interested. (Separate blogs work like separate channels. Having a lot of them isn't a problem and it helps people filter out stuff they aren't interested in.)
If you can't make it for the trip in 2010, then perhaps you can come visit us someday if we can pull off living there.
