It's Almost Time to Hit the Great South Pacific

Can't say I'm not a little jealous about this trip - well, I have been jealous of all of them - but one place I still want to go is New Zealand and Australia. It's like America light: more fun, better attitudes and no guns. What more could a California native want?!

So Katie leaves on her "South Pacific Adventure" on July 3rd to spend a great deal of time on an airplane to get to the other side of the world (side being north/south for a change) and we'll only be five hours apart (us ahead of her by roughly five) but that's really a day and five hours in some bizarre time/space continuum.

There was a lot of preparing involved.

Before any trip, the kids have to go to a bunch of People toPeople meetings (with their parents) and do a lot of pre-work learning about the geography, culture, history and more of each of the countries they will visit. They also do a little community service here (and more on the trip) because People to People really wants these delegates to be connected to the places they are going. Our group did a food and book drive locally and we got a little picture of the kiddos at Santa Clara Middle School at our last meeting.

Now we have the countdown to departure which is thankfully in the afternoon this year - the last two years have been at the crack of dawn as P2P wants everyone there three hours ahead of the flight (oh yeah, good times).

Katie, whose brain clearly turned to mush now that school is out, has to figure out what to take. The weather will be similar to summer in San Francisco, which is to say damp and cool. I don't think packing will be that hard given we know that weather pretty well.

This is going to be a big trip.

There will be lots of ground to cover and flights moving these kids around. I'll be doing my usual daily posts while she's gone with itineraries and any photos and news she sends. The new app this year is Viber - apparently a great phone and texting app that only works on wi-fi so maybe it will keep expenses down a bit on the telecommunications front.

Next post - pics from the airport! Stay tuned!