The previous post about the U.S. Immigration computers ended on a high note, but it was a false alarm. The nationwide system did not come back on-line. Instead, Immigration officers brought out notebook computers and processed us using those, so at least the line started moving.

But while in line to get processed, I received a text message from American Airlines that my 2:30pm flight to Boston was canceled. I am now booked for a later flight, and protected on an alternate route via JFK & LaGuardia which will still get me to Boston in time for my orthodontist appointment tomorrow morning. For the uninitiated, being “protected” is something offered to higher level frequent flyers in that the airline will block seats on an alternate routing in case the first routing fails to work out. Nice service - but I don’t know if I will retain that next year as I will not requalify for American’s Executive Platinum status - I only just made regular Platinum (and the rest of the family are all Gold-level fliers with American).

Then there will be a question of whether (or perhaps “weather”) or not my orthodontist will even be open tomorrow due to the results of the inclement weather in Boston.

In any event, keep your fingers crossed…

UPDATE: I actually made it to Boston, just a few hours late.

We made it back to Bonaire last night, safe and sound, although Linda and Krystyana have managed to bring a cold back with them.

It’s been an interesting almost eight weeks, and I plan on attempting to add more stories and photos here in the coming weeks, as work permits.

As a teaser, some of the other highlights of our trip include a pod of dolphins, real flowing lava, learning Polynesian traditions culture first-hand, and checking out volcanoes of various sorts.

I head off on Sunday to Boston for a couple of intimate days with my orthodontist, getting some dental work taken care of. I am not looking forward to freezing my butt off.

Bula! (that means “Hello”, among other things, here on Fiji)

Well, after traveling thousands of miles, and getting to Fiji just over a week ago, we would like to report that we are in fact live and well, and finally at a resort with decent Internet access.

Not that that necessarily means that we’ll be posting all of our last 30+ days of adventures all at once, but at least there’s a greater likelihood of more frequent posts.

However, we wanted to share with you that our adventure tomorrow (Fiji time) is to find the source of the world-famous, premium bottled water known as “Fiji Water“. For years, many of the nicer hotels and restaurants we have frequented in the U.S. and elsewhere have offered Fiji Water as the premium bottled water, and we figured while we are actually on the big island - Vitu Levu - of Fiji, we might as well go and see where Fiji Water actually comes from.

We’ve hired a driver (his name is Babu) and his car, for the three hour drive north along the western coast of Vitu Levu, with frequent stops for photo opportunities along the way, including a place known as the Garden of the Sleeping Giant, rumored to have been discovered/started by Raymond Burr (of TV’s Ironside fame).

We hope to report on our success in the coming few days.

In the meantime we leave you with the fact that Fiji is hot, humid, and quite friendly. We had a nice relaxed time last week on Castaway Island, and got some nice diving in too. All the pictures from last week are sorted and cleaned up, but still need to be tagged.

Oh, and we all got henna tattoos yesterday. Although the Yin-Yang I got looks more like a deformed eyeball. More on that later…

As some of you have remarked upon privately, we are woefully behind in updating this blog. I would happily blame technology, and specifically Internet connectivity, especially as even now here in Maui, finally off the boat, we still have a crappy connection. Turns out that here in the Maui Prince Hotel, which is otherwise a very nice hotel indeed, the Internet connection provides only for Web site access - no other type of connection is possible, meaning that the bulk uploading of images is well nigh impossible. I’ve reverted to a Sprint Wireless Broadband connection, but here in the southern part of habited Maui, the signal is almost non-existent, so the connection is painfully slow.

But the reality of the situation is that we’ve just been so very busy that we collapse in exhaustion every night, without the energy to process photos and write more entries, and then are up early in the morning to embark on that day’s adventures.

Similarly, the kids have not been doing traditional school work (math, basically) as a result of our filling our days so well, although they certainly have been learning all sorts of new things.

We hope to catch up with our backlog (which includes hundreds more photos) as we move to the Big Island of Hawaii tomorrow, where we’ll be staying for five nights, and only have a day of activities booked while there at this point.

I’ll try and post Bora Bora tonight, and let’s not discuss how many days ago that actually happened!

After months of agonizing over the software and content to use for this site, we’re doing a soft launch of The Traveling Richters web site tonight. It’s a very soft launch, as we are still missing a lot of content. However, we have all reasonable expectations that we’ll be able to flesh things out in short order, as well as add new material based on our on going travel adventures, debacles, and escapades.

The base purpose of this site is to keep friends and family up to date on our whereabouts and adventures, while at the same time creating a travelogue of our journeys for our kids to use as part of the work they do as distance learners (or homeschoolers or even unschoolers, if those terms are more familiar).

However, as we will also be reviewing restaurants, hotels, and other services and products as we encounter them, we hope this site will be useful to others who stumble across it in time.