The national team is off, well... mostly off to the New Zealand National Championships, which are about to take place in Wellington, the capital city of the country also known as Middle Earth. The team will have to enjoy it from the windows of the planes though, as they are there to gain experience in playing the Kiwi national team, who we have rarely encountered over the past quadrennial. The Kiwis, as you'll likely remember, beat us for the gold at the 2004 Paralympic Games, with our Canuck team taking the silver.

In addition to the Kiwi club teams, and their national team, we'll also be playing some Australian teams, one of which has a Texas import by the name of Mark Zupan playing for them. It should be a solid tournament!

I said 'mostly off' simply because one of our team members, actually our Team Leader, Cathy Cadieux, is not with the team quite yet due to some computer problems at the Air Canada end of things. She will be joining the team one day later, and is currently stuck in Los Angeles. Despite having a ticket that had been validated by their own computer system, the AC people had no knowledge of Cathy's ticket, and the outbound connector flight was full, so they couldn't do anything else but get her part of the way there, and thus she awaits her Air New Zealand portion of her flight now, which leaves near midnight tonight.