Archive | May, 2013

This year Libertopia has a new date (Labour Day weekend) and a new venue (less charming than last year’s, but also less exposed to the elements, and still in San Diego); details here. Among the scheduled speakers are such Molinari/C4SSers as Gary Chartier, Anthony Gregory, Charles Johnson, Stephan Kinsella, Stephanie Murphy, Sheldon Richman, and your humble correspondent.

Here’s a pic of the FMAC contingent at the APEE in Maui:

Charles Johnson, Ross Kenyon, Roderick Long

Thanks to a last-minute program change, a number of would-be attendees thought our session was on a different day, so turnout was a tad thin. There was a bigger turnout for the Bastiat panel I was on.

After the conference I took a free day in Maui and another free day in Oahu.

My free day in Maui: In the morning I decided to drive from Lahaina to Kahului the “hard” way, around the bulgy northwestern shore. If I had realised just how rugged that road was, I might not have attempted it – but I’m glad I did. The cliffside road is narrow, steep, twisty, and in places one-lane (so when you meet another car you sometimes have to back up to the last place the road widened) and/or gravel. But absolutely spectacular views.

In the afternoon I drove up Haleakala, the volcano (not technically extinct, but inactive the past few centuries; the active ones are over on the Big Island, which I didn’t have time/money to visit) at Maui’s center. It’s 10,000 feet high – almost twice as high as Jerome AZ, where I was earlier last month – and you go from sea level to 10,000 feet in just about 39 miles. At the bottom it’s lush and green because it’s under the clouds all the time. Then you drive into the clouds, and the landscape becomes strange and mysterious while free-range cows saunter across the highway amid the swirling mists. Then you’re above the clouds, way above, like being in an airplane, and the terrain becomes desert-like because it gets so little rain, and the road keeps going up, incredibly, until at the top there’s an arid moonscape overlooking a massive crater, and the air is so thin you think maybe you are indeed on another planet, and the clouds are far, far below.

I didn’t take the following picture. I’ll upload my own pics later.

Haleakala

Later in the afternoon I took part of the Road to Hana, which is like the Lahaina-to-Kahului road I described above except less extreme. But I turned back before getting to Hana, because it was getting late and that’s not a road I fancied essaying in the dark.

On my free day in Oahu, I visited locations where my mother had lived in 1937-38, including Lanikai (near where Edgar Rice Burroughs lived a couple of years later; Burroughs even put Lanikai into one of his Martian novels). I didn’t take this pic of Lanikai either:

Lanikai

I also walked around downtown Honolulu and Chinatown, drove over the Pali and around Diamond Head, and had a mai-tai on Waikiki beach at the Royal Hawaiian.

I saw a car with an Idaho license plate. That must have been a tricky drive over.