Places

My first ride hitchhiking in the Puna district was with two old hippies, beards to their stomachs, who started smoking pot as soon as I got in the car. “You guys grow up around here?” I asked. One of them …

  “Anything that can create itself by erupting out of the bowels of the Pacific Ocean is worth looking at.” —Hunter S. Thompson, The Curse of Lono The rain closed down the backcountry trails my first few nights on the …

“Oh man,” said my friend Tui when I mentioned Kealakekua Bay. “That’s where Captain Cook got got.” Which is a polite way of saying that James Cook got stabbed to death with a spear, then had the flesh cooked off …

It’s not as easy as driving. But if you don’t want to spend your vacation dough on a car, hitchhiking is still widely practiced on the Big Island. Let me preface this by saying that there is a public transportation …

Gouged into the walls of Hawaii’s Hamakua Coast is the Waipi’o Valley, a legendary gorge that has been the home to countless rulers of the island. Getting down to this sacred site is hard. Getting out is even harder. “Hey …

Scene on the Wailiku River near Hilo in 1947, one year after a tsunami devastated the town. (photo: Roger Coryell) Hilo Bay is calm in the evening. Even with the remnants of a tropical storm dumping buckets of rain on …

They hook you in with the music. There you are in the terminal, like you’ve been for a hundred flights before, and the ticket agent comes on the speaker to tell you that your flight with Hawaiian Airlines is now …

(photo: Bettmann/CORBIS) You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.  –Jack London He was a dropout, a hobo, an oyster poacher. He was an excellent sailor, a less excellent rancher, a deeply committed socialist, …

My first view of the Pacific came after driving through fire. If you’ve been following the news, you know about the wildfires that are blanketing California in a thick haze of smoke. On Highway 299, for pretty much the entire …

Another series as part of this road trip will be American Highways, where I’ll examine some famous American roads, their history, and what it’s like to take them. Up first, U.S. 50. It starts with a Life Magazine article from …