Off to Costa Rica

Well we are really finally going. After a year of saying "We are going to Costa Rica" now it is happening. It seems surreal when you book the tickets and now have to start packing. What to bring what to leave. This seems trivial but yet if we bring to much, thats what we have to drag around for 5 weeks. If we forget something or leave it behind on purpose then what if we need it? Well I have to trust that it will be fine. Whatever we have will be good enough.
We are leaving on Dec. 31 and will be staying till Feb 1. It is way faster than we antisipated but sometimes you just have to go with the flow and make it work.
We had planned on spending a week at a YWAM base in Heredia which is by San Jose and then spending some time working at a kids camp that a Capenray bible school is sponsering but the YWAM people unexpectedly went to serve in Pannama and won't be around so I am going to need to get in touch with someone else from the base and see if we can still go there. If not we are not sure what we will be doing that first week.I am waiting for an e-mail to let us know more info on contacts at this place. I would love to go there, it sounds like a great place to be. The plan is that we make some great contacts with some organizations that set up groups on missions and bring this info. back to our community so that we can lead a group back there next year, so it feels important to be able to visit as many places as possible to gather as much info as possible so that we can show whoever will be interested next year a bit about what is happening there. I know that there are so many ways that vollunteers are really needed but it would be great to see a few options. So we hope that something will pop up in the next 2 weeks.
After we have spent the first 2 weeks at the different mission bases we will be travelling to the Caribean coast to the south near Panama. Maybe we can find out where these people from the YWAM base went and see them in Panama!!! We hope to finish off our scuba certification here and also spend some time in the jungle rainforests exploring this very different place. We have never seen a real wet rainforest and expect to see sloths and howler monkeys and manetees that live near the ocean and in the jungle. We hope to enrole in a spanish class and broaden our horrizens a bit. Apparently there is a place to do this here. After we're sick of the caribean coast(ya right) or after a couple of weeks, we are planning on heading to the Pacific coast and visiting a place called Jaco beach. From there we will wander the Pacific for the next few weeks till we have to come home. In this time the kids need to make sure to keep up with their school work so it can't all be fun right?
All of these things are in the plans but we are hoping that if things are different when we get there that's o.k. too. We are leaving our last 3 weeks open to change our plans to however it works out best. So we'll keep you posted.
Thanks for your prayers for saftey while we are away. We also hope that God will keep putting ways in our path that we can have the opertunity to show Jesus's love.
Wendy