Two years ago, I accompanied Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on a trip to Liverpool and Blackburn in northern England — the home district of Jack Straw, who at the time was Britain's foreign secretary.

From there, we flew to Iraq, with Miss Rice and Mr. Straw sharing her cabin on the plane — she let him use her bed while she slept on the floor. The trip became known in the media as "Condi and Jack's road show."

Miss Rice had promised her colleague to visit his home after she had taken him to her native Birmingham, Alabama, in 2005. She said she was beginning to host a series of visits by her counterparts from other countries so they can get to know the United States outside Washington and New York.

Since then, however, Miss Rice has hosted only one other foreign minister, Alexander Downer of Australia, whose government lost re-election last fall. They visited California a year ago.

On Thursday, Miss Rice will fly to the golden state again, this time with Mr. Straw's successor, David Miliband, who was appointed Britain's chief diplomat when Prime Minister Gordon Brown took office last year.

They will visit her home town of Palo Alto, outside San Francisco, where she lived before coming to Washington in 2001 and worked as provost of Stanford University. They will tour Internet giant Google and Bloom Energy, an alternative energy company, and meet entrepreneurs and venture capitalists on the high-tech "cutting edge," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.

"For her, it is personal," he said. "She is able to share with one of her close colleagues a little bit of her life."

Some of us are wondering why Miss Rice hasn't invited on a domestic tour foreign ministers who know less about the U.S. than those from Britain and Australia, the two countries that are probably closer to the U.S. culturally than any other.

When I once suggested on the plane to her aides that she show around Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, the response was: "Don't count on it." Apparently, she has to like the person she hosts.

— Nicholas Kralev, diplomatic correspondent, The Washington Times

On April 7, we published a story about James Glassman, whose nomination as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs is being help up by Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican (State nominee blocked over VOA broadcasts).

Mr. Coburn has long had concerns about anti-American bias in U.S. government broadcasts for Iran and has sought for years to obtain English transcripts of Farsi-language programs from the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). Mr. Glassman is BBG chairman.

The board has transcribed more than 140 hours of programming, but the senator wants everything said on the air translated and transcribed, so it can be monitored. The BBG says it's too expensive at $3,300 an hour of air time charged by the National Virtual Translation Center to do much more — it simply doesn't have the money.

Through all this, Mr. Glassman remained silent, as it the practice for any nominee to a senior government job until he or she is confirmed by the Senate. That changed yesterday, when he spoke at the Heritage Foundation — a good opportunity for a follow-up to my earlier story (State nominee defends VOA).

I've heard from many readers on the issue of the VOA's Persian broadcasts in recent weeks, and I'd encourage them to express their views in the comments section below.

— Nicholas Kralev, diplomatic correspondent, The Washington Times

When I headed recently to northern Finland, about 100 miles above the Arctic Circle, the last thing I expected my trip to deal with was diplomacy. I thought I'd see a lot of snow and ice, feel the cold and witness environmental peculiarities as a result of climate change.

But as I was sitting in a room at the University of Lapland's Arctic Center, one of the professors there, an American named Bruce Forbes, mentioned in passing that several countries around the Arctic Ocean are pouring millions of dollars into research to prove that large parts of the Arctic seabed are a "natural prolongation" of their territory.

If they are successful in their claims, they will have the right to the oil, gas and other natural resources there. No one knows for sure what exactly lies under the Arctic Ocean, but estimates put that amount at up to 20 percent of the world's energy supply.

After I came back home, I called the State Department's Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs to find out what the United States is doing to prepare for its claim, which must be submitted to the U.N. Commission on the Limits of Continental Shelf.

The head of the bureau, Assistant Secretary Claudia A. McMurray, told me that the department is spending $5.6 million this year on research, which has already shown that the foot of the continental slope off Alaska is more than 100 miles farther from the U.S. coast than previously thought.

The problem is that the United States doesn't have the legal right to make any claims at this time. You can find out why in my story, U.S. pursues Arctic claim, which ran today.

— Nicholas Kralev, diplomatic correspondent, The Washington Times

Every time I come back from a trip with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, I ask myself whether it was worth the money we paid for it.

A cynic would probably offer an easy no for an answer, and there are many who would argue that the Bush administration's foreign policy successes have been too modest to justify Miss Rice's travel expenditures — the Air Force plane, the fuel cost, the hotels suites and all the rest.

Miss Rice and her entourage, on the other hand, would probably say that trying to bring peace to the Middle East or to end North Korea's nuclear program is worth every penny spent on travel.

But for a newspaper, the answer is not that simple. Since we are in the business of news, we try to compare the monetary cost of our news-gathering against the value of the stories we write.

That value, however, is not always easy to measure. True, if an article gets numerous hits on our Web site, we — and our advertisers — feel satisfied that it reached a large audience. Sometimes, though, a story may not attract a huge readership but have public-interest value, which happens mostly when we write about policy and other serious issues.

Diplomacy invariably falls in that category. Even though most of what diplomats do seems foreign and detached to most Americans, their work actually affects people's lives. The price of oil and the war in Iraq are perfect examples of that.

So whenever I board Miss Rice's plane, where I'm now writing these notes, I hope that I'll get several front-page stories out of the trip ahead of us. I'd consider it a bonus if I were to meet people on the road that would become sources for future stories.

Packed schedule and waiting around

This trip we are now wrapping up took us only to London, Israel and the Palestinian territories, but the schedule was packed.

In London on Friday, Miss Rice had several meetings with fellow foreign ministers from several major powers — on the Middle East peace process, on Iran's nuclear program and on the future of newly independent Kosovo.

I filed three stories that day. The Middle East article we only posted on our Web site, we ran a front-page story about a "refreshed" package of incentives offered to Iran if it suspends sensitive nuclear work, and we published the Kosovo piece in the paper's foreign section.

We frequently complain that we are made to wait around far too long on these trips, and the waiting times seem to be increasing. There is a saying that no embassy employee has ever been fired for taking the press somewhere too early.

On Friday, we had to leave our hotel in central London an hour and a half before the start of a press conference in Lancaster House, the guest house of the Foreign Office, which is only a 10- to 15-minute drive away (and, by the way, next door to the home of Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla).

As we had predicted, we were sitting in the briefing room within half an hour, having gone through security, as well as down and then up some stairs through the back.

Reaching out of the bubble

Another half-hour later, however, I was no longer frustrated about the waiting. Since U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and European foreign ministers were to participate in the press conference, some of their aides started coming in.

I've known some of them for years, but others I met for the first time. I had conversations that gave me valuable information on the upcoming European Union mission in Kosovo and the legal issues raised by Russia, which opposes Kosovo's independence, unlike most of the West.

Being on an official trip often feels like you are in bubble, from which it's hard to get a sense of the real world. So it helps tremendously when we have a chance to hear the views of other countries and compare them to what U.S. officials tell us.

I had such an opportunity again in Ramallah, the West Bank city that houses the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' office. We always go there from Jerusalem in Miss Rice's motorcade, and then wait in a large press conference hall while she visits with Mr. Abbas.

On Sunday, Mr. Abbas' aides told me that he was "really depressed" by the lack of progress in negotiations with Israel, and that he appears more upbeat in public because he would lose his people's support if he were to tell them how he felt. That was the lead of my story on Monday's front page.

Paying for access

We often say that, on these trips, we don't pay for the travel but for the access — there are only nine of us on this trip. Although Miss Rice has a private cabin, she does come back to brief the "traveling press" on the record on almost every leg. If she decides not to brief on our way back home, she still pays us a visit for an off-the-record chat.

In addition, we have her aides at our disposal — on and off the plane. They regularly give us background briefings on Miss Rice's meetings at the end of the day in our "filing center" at the hotel where we are staying. In our stories, we refer to those briefers as "senior State Department officials traveling with the secretary."

Those officials can be very helpful outside the officials briefings as well. Just today, one of them saved my story from looking stupid.

On our flight from Tel Aviv to Shannon, where we often make refueling stops, Miss Rice told us about American monitors verifying whether the Israelis remove roadblocks in the West Bank under a commitment they made to her, and whether that actually helps the Palestinians' daily lives.

We were left with the impression that those observers were about to begin their work, so I wrote my story in future tense, as did my colleagues, and filed once we were on the ground. A few minutes later, I walked by one of those "senior officials" and asked him if our impression was right.

He said that the monitors have, in fact, been working for several weeks. I immediately called our foreign editor in Washington, Willis Witter, and asked him to change the future tense to present. My impromptu conversation with the official also yielded more information on the subject than Miss Rice had shared on the plane.

— Nicholas Kralev, diplomatic correspondent, The Washington Times