A New Adventure

Welcome everybody to the first of what will be many stories from the Aho travel diary! If you want to be added or removed from the list, just post a comment and it will be sent to me. At the moment they aren't viewable by anyone but me.

Stating it up front for the benefit of all who read this, whatever else this travel diary will be, it will NOT have the character of a church newsletter. While our (Tim and Tammy's) own love for God and the nature of our vocational responsibilities will spill over into our stories, I am not writing this to regale anyone with how wonderful it is to be a Christian leader or to convince someone to visit their local church. This is simply a kind of blog:

• Blog is short for weblog. A weblog is a journal (or newsletter) that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or the Web site. (http://www.bytowninternet.com/glossary)

My aim for this journey together over the next 13 months is to be informative, funny, challenging, inspirational, and probably sarcastic from time to time. I hope to educate the geographically and culturally-challenged (starting with me!), while being witty and insightful (just like my hero of all things witty and sarcastically insightful, my son Andrew).

I might push the boundaries on occasion, deliberately or accidentally; in either case I hope you will extend grace to me and gently reply with your comments or correction. OK?

As for the name for the e-mail form of this: 'Aho USA Update Issue 01; 2006-07-12' sounds so institutional! We need a new name! Something better than 'Letters from the Loo' which I used for irregular (no pun intended) issues back in 1997 and 1998 during a similar 7-month stint in America. Rising early one morning as is my habit, I discovered that the only available room in the house for writing e-mails on my laptop was to sit on the toilet seat with the dirty linen basket as my desk! So, SEND ME YOUR SUGGESTIONS FOR A CLEVER AND CATCHY NAME for this e-mail blog!

The journey begins tomorrow: we depart BHX for EWR, make a connection to ATL before getting to IND late in the evening. According to our flight itinerary, we will be about 14 hours in the air tomorrow, traveling some....well, I tried to look to see how many miles, but it's not on the itinerary. Have to figure that later.

So here we go. Let's enjoy this ride together.