We've talked today to a couple of high-flying former officials, Michael Green and Randy Schriver, now both in different Washington think-tanks, about New Zealand and the United States relationship, which I will cover tomorrow.
Schriver's partner, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, was unfortunately not able to
make it having just returned this morning from a visit to the Middle East.
He is the burly former Pentagon hawk who oversaw the anti-nuclear reprisals against New Zealand in the 1980s and now believes they are counter-productive, according to articles co-authored with Schriver. It was a shame we couldn't hear the power of his message from his own lips.
We also had lunch with the US ambassador to New Zealand Bill McCormick at one of his own restaurants, McCormick and Schmick's in central Washington DC.
We were instructed that we could not report anything we learned at the lunch so it is probably forbidden to say that the tailed creatures sticking out of the jumbo prawn cocktail were the size of a big toe - and infinitely more succulent - and that the tilapia pan fried in a cashew crust with Jamaican rum butter was heavenly.
It is a rather fine establishment on K Street, done out in dark mahogany and stained glass and doesn't feel anything like the chain it belongs to.
To reflect its individual environment, it has a stained glass donkey for Democrat diners above the left door going into the dining room and an elephant for Republicans on the right hand - and that, hopefully, is the last time we'll hear of any more elephants and rooms on this trip.
Helen Clark lands in Washington about midnight tonight (4pm NZ time) and will be whisked straight to Blair House - the presidential guest house where she was put up in 2002.
She'll have MFAT boss Simon Murdoch with her as well as Heather Simpson, her chief of staf, and Kathryn Street, her chief press secretary. And she will be briefed by ambassador Roy Fergusson, who incidentally was here and sat in on Jim Bolger's meeting with President Clinton in 1995.
