Hi everyone,

We have arrived safely in Dallas, but are pretty jetlagged. Everyone is feeling foggy.

The flight to LA was great - we were well looked after and the robots were treated carefully.  It was a really full flight, travellers starting to move again since the volcano cloud is moving.

We had a 6 hour stop in LA, so checked in our luggage to the Dallas flights nice and early.  The Southwest airline staff were not happy with the heavy tools and equipment and made us open up our cases.  Picture us sitting in the middle of the line, floor strewn all over, covered in saws, hammers, spanners, electronics parts, batteries, robots pulled out of packaging.....the other people in line were quite loudly commenting "what on earth are they planning to do???"

The team had to repack the gear spreading the tools and bits around the cases.  Finally after the bags were checked we had a short time left to catch a city bus to a shopping centre and pick up some lunch and fruit and veges for the week.  Kate realised she had lost her boarding pass just as they were about to board...and proved that she can still run very very fast. She raced back to the security check, where they informed her that it was not very smart to lose your boarding pass....duh!  Fortunately the ticketing office issued her another without question and she made the flight.

The team were split up on 3 different flights so we staggered into the hotel in dribs and drabs, ate dinner and collapsed into bed at about 11pm.  Rhiannon has vague memories of Kate and Terry reciting the Haka as she drifted off to sleep.

Today has been a very sluggish day.  Most of us managed to rise by 11am, Ethan wins the Total Slug award, waking at 12:30pm.  Kate, George,Terry P and Daniel have gone to the Dallas Aquarium this afternoon, while Rhiannon catches up on communications, Michael continues with programming, Richard, Max and Ethan are doing repairs and overhauling the robots which sustained quite rough handing from the domestic airlines.  Almost every team got damage done to crates, toolboxes, bags and robots.  We are not impressed with the lack of ability to read FRAGILE.

We will keep you up to date each evening with our news, and can send you more frequent news by text if you like.  Please send us your cell phone number if you want to be texted.  You can also check our website www.robotics.org.nz or watch games live on Nasa TV (info on our website).

You can contact us through this email, or text Terry on 027 482 1581.

Cheer loud for us, we will do our best to put NZ on the map and bring back trophies galore.