Thank goodness the flames are subsiding in Greece. The first thing I did after returning to my office last week was to sit down with my staff and crisis-manage this, since we have on-going tours there.
We have two tours going next week and our route takes us right through the hottest zones in the Peloponnese. We had visions of our bus heading south through burned-out hillsides with traumatized locals heading north. Lousy vacation.
The easy response would be to cancel the next two departures. But we have Greek friends who need the business, guides who need the work and (after an email survey) 49 out of 50 tour members who still want to go if possible. If we could do a good tour safely, we wanted to try.
The decision: Make a secondary itinerary, swapping out fire-zone days (like in the Mani Peninsula and around Olympia) with fire-free areas in the north (Metéora), get provisional hotel bookings and decide later when we know how things are going.
Anne and I are taking this same tour for our annual vacation in two weeks, so we have a personal interest in what’s going on.
I don’t think the news reports can convey the horror of this tragedy. What a sad and frightening thing for the people of Greece to go through. We’re all thankful that things seem to be getting under control.
From Greece, I fly to Rome to do a video about Peter for my church. When the Lutheran Church (ELCA) asks me to host a video and they are excited enough about the project to send copies of the video we’ll produce to all 12,000 ELCA churches in the USA, I say sure. I’m working with Tim Frakes (the one-man film production department for the ELCA) on the script now.
Someone asked about the availability of these videos. We have a single DVD that includes all five ELCA videos I’ve done so far (two hours of programming). It’s called “Faithful Travel with Rick Steves.” (We sell it for $19.95 and donate 100 percent of the proceeds to Lutheran World Relief. Or, the Luther program is available free at Youtube–search rick steves luther.)
Two of my favorite productions ever are one filmed in Papua New Guinea (where I got to share my ideas on “reading the Bible through Third World eyes” and the harsh realities of the gap between the rich and poor world) and another in Germany — the Story of Martin Luther.
The Luther show was probably the toughest script challenge I’ve ever tackled and the most gratifying…giving our church an update over the melodramatic old black and white 1960s-era Sunday school videos that I grew up with, of Luther pounding his thesis onto the door of that church in Wittenberg.
Editing a hard copy of this St. Peter script with a pen, rather than my standard pencil, I realized why I love my pencil. I must do the majority of my hard-copy editing and note-taking on a sofa or on the bed. Pens don’t work upside down.