Members of Our Sabbatical Group In 2004 Julia and I made our first visit to the ‘Holy Land’. It was an eight day ‘pilgrimage’ organised by the church we belonged to at the time and very much like all the other ‘church tours’ you see charging round all the ‘holy sites’ –  and some of […]

We land at Luton Airport at 1.00 a.m. Israeli time … 12.00 midnight UK time. We both put on jumpers and coats etc. before we disembark from the plane. The temperature has gone from hot and sunny and 33 degrees in Israel to cold and wet and 7 degrees here in the UK. It has […]

Today is our last day here in Israel-Palestine. We are awake early and finish our packing before going down to breakfast. Our flight home is not until 7.20 p.m this evening, although we have to be at the airport by 4.30 p.m. The big at taxi is coming to pick us up at 3.00 p.m. […]

Today is Eid al-Hada or Greater Eid, in the Moslem calendar, and the beginning of an important four day religious holiday for Moslems to honour the willingness of the Prophet Abraham to sacrifice his young firstborn son Ishmael (not Isaac you will note) as an act of submission to God, and his son’s acceptance of […]

Today we are off to Bethlehem via the Mount of Olives, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Church of All Nations, and Saint Pierre en Gallicante. I hope that we do not have as much walking to do as we did yesterday. My legs are still aching although I feel much fitter after the best part […]

We wake up after a wonderful night’s sleep to discover that at the Ritz Hotel breakfast this morning is as good as dinner was last night. There is a wonderful selection of fruit salads and … as near as you can get to a ‘full English breakfast’ as I guess is possible in Israel-Palestine including […]

We wake early. Today we are leaving Saint Margaret’s and Nazareth after three weeks. Our cases are packed. Our breakfast is eaten. Our prayers are said. We check our emails … and discover that one of the two churches Julia’s name was sent to this month has responded. Unfortunately it is yet another polite rejection […]

Our Sabbatical Group at NETS I am woken up at 6.30 a.m. by Salim knocking on the doors of a new group that arrived to stay last night. The leader of this group insisted that everyone have a wake up call at 6.30 a.m. and since there are no phones in our rooms Salim has […]

      I am woken up at 7.00 a.m. by Julia pulling our bedroom curtains open and exclaiming (as she has done every morning since we have been in Israel), ‘Guess what? It’s hot and sunny again!’ I groan and roll over and put my head under the pillow! The party that was going […]

We only have one more week together here in Israel. A week today we will be flying back to the UK. Today we are all going off on our own. We have hired a mini-bus and we are going back to the Galilee. We went towards the beginning of our stay in Nazareth but none […]