We, that is my wife and I, are on the road again.  This time three weeks to New Zealand.  You see, we belong to a travel organization called "Friendship Force International".  They are having a world conference there and it seems to be a good excuse to visit.  We just left this morning from Nebraska, so we are eagerly (sic!) looking forward to just about an entire day of travel.

The way Friendship Force works is through what they call exchanges.  These are actually just groups of people who travel to cities throughout the world and stay up to a week at a time with FF host families.  Sometimes the exchange is organized by a local club, and other times, like this one, destination clubs open the exchange to anyone who wants to go.  We end up getting to know local people, especially our home hosts, and we find that friendships form easily.  Anyway, if you want some good professionally developed explanations, try visiting the Friendship Force website.

Ah, back to the blog.  Anyway, I tried this once before when we had an exchange to Japan.  Gave each member of our traveling group a day to write up.  You know, lots of tablets and such.  And me with my monster laptop.  At least it's a monster compared with iPads and the like.  Turns out that there was a flaw in the ointment.  It seems that WiFi is not always available.  Ah!  Says I.  Then just copy your stuff to a thumb drive.  Another fly (it's getting to be sort of like what you find around old fish) - most tablets don't have standard USB connectivity - especially the iPad.  So I got hard copy, very late e-mails (their hosts didn't have WiFi connections, some no computer at all.  So this time, I think it's me that will be doing the typing.  By the way, Apple does make a nice dongle to convert the Apple-specific port to a standard USB port.  And yes, I know, Microsoft makes a tablet that is supposed to have standard USB connection.  But they are terribly uncommon.

Enough of the blather.  At this point, we are in the San Francisco Airport awaiting our time to board the flight to Auckland.  It's been a good ride so far.  United Airlines in the U.S. and they seem to be far more professional and personable that in the old days.  Thanks to them.  The gate agent in Denver needed to free up some overhead space, and went so far as to check our two carry-ons through to Auckland at no charge (we had already checked our other two).  This makes wandering the airport much more comfortable.  Next, we get to sample Kiwi hospitality on our Air New Zealand flight.

More later.  We'll lose two days across the date line, so don't look for anything tomorrow.

Let's see just how dedicated and responsible I'll be.