Once
a journal is designed, equipped and put in process, a new factor enters and
takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all
other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness... We
find after yers of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us...Only
when this is recognized... do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is
like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
-- John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley (1960)
Miscellaneous Travel
(5 year trip on bottom of page)
2008
April: Death Valley and back (no photos of flat tires...)
June: Washington DC for Flights of Fire and TransforUs (Ashville, NC)
August: Burning Man (yay!)
2007
January: Chicago ASSA Meeting
June-July: Iceland, the UK and NYC
Late July: Portland
September: Burning Man
October: Brussels, Prague and Passau
December/Jan: New York and New Orleans
2006
January: Boston ASSA Meeting (ASSA means "Allied Social Sciences Association", but it's only for economists!)
January: Yosemite Snowshoeing!
February: Mt Lassen XC-Ski
March: Three weeks in Cuba and Yucatan. [Comments]
June: Hiking in Hetch Hetchy
2005: Busy! 15 air trips in 3 months (vs. 25 in 5 years on the road). Click on the SPONSOR or EVENT for info, the PLACE for photos.
June 18 - 24: Institute for Humane Studies hosted the Social Change Workshop for Graduate Students at University of Virginia. Participant photos (with password)
July 10-14: European Science Days hosted the Summer School on Economics, Extra-legal Protection and Organized Crime in Steyr, Austria. Also visited Linz and Wien.
July 18-21: CESifo hosted the Summer Institutes on Economics and Psychology and Political Economy and Development in Venezia, Italy. [Photos from Venezia]
July 24-30: Foundation for Teaching Economics hosted the Economics for Leaders summer school at Claremont McKenna College, California.
Aug 10-14: Association for Evolutionary Economics hosted the Institutional Economics in the 21st Century summer school at Colorado State University, Fort Collins.
Aug 16: Passed my oral exam and had a party.
Problems with Images?? Internet Explorer will not display some pages correctly (Firefox does).
You get top of page (movies) with main link. Click on IE-pix to see photos.Aug 25-27: Lancaster University Department of Sociology hosted the Perspectives on Moral Economy Conference in Lancaster, England. [Photos from England and Wales] IE-pix [Photos from Scotland] IE-pix
Sep 29-Oct 1: International Society for New Institutional Economics hosted The Institutions of Market Exchange Conference at Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain. [Photos from Spain] IE-pix
Oct 14-16: Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy hosted the Tenth International Karl Polanyi Conference at Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey. [Photos from Turkey] IE-pix
Oct 20-21: Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) hosted Advances in the Theory of Contests and Tournaments Conference in Germany. [Photos from Berlin] IE-pix
Oct 28-29: The Bren School of Environmental Science and Management hosted the 8th Occasional California Workshop on Environmental and Resource Economics at UC Santa Barbara. [Beach and Halloween Photos] IE-pix
2004
July: Peru & El Salvador
Aug 11-17: Experimental Economics Workshop at George Mason University and DC (
Xmas/New Years: Paris & Amsterdam
2003
Jun 19-25: Free Market Environmentalism summer school at PERC. Here's a photo.
The Big Trip (1995 -- 2000)
I traveled for five years (April 1995 to April 2000) to about 65 countries in Europe and Asia. I wanted to travel because I was curious about the world and felt that being there is a lot more informative than reading or viewing information about a country (especially when one considers the role of editing!). I traveled most of the time but went back to the States twice (for three weeks and two months), each time after about 18 months of travel. Money? I budgeted, saved, and spent about $50,000 (or $10,000/year or $30/day as a rule of thumb) on the trip. I invested all this money in the stock market before I left and returned with more than I started with! This was an excellent example of a "free lunch." Some may argue that I would have made more both working and not spending my money, but I tend to think that travel is better than work and the stock market lost a lot of dot-com gains right after I returned (taking my early retirement dreams with it!). It was a sort of free lunch followed by proof that free lunches don't last for long! Click here for trip statistics.
The hardest part of the travel was deciding to go. The best part was people. The worst part was the mail service (I found internet everywhere). Every country was interesting in a way; every country gets better as memory of past horrors fade. My favorites were Egypt, Hungary (rather, Budapest), India, Israel (rather, Jerusalem), Italy, Laos, Kirgizstan, Madagascar, Mongolia, Morocco, Nepal, Spain, Turkey, and Yemen. I missed Iran and Iraq. I wasn't sick very often. Someone asked me what I learned in five years. I learned that parents love their children. The rest of my experience was about coping with me, what I wanted, what I couldn't get and why that hardly mattered.
Photos and rants are complementary pages from the big trip. Photos are probably more relaxing to view; rants may elicit your frustration - either because you disagree with my "crazed" views or, worse, if you agree with how bad some things are. I still have three years of travel left (Africa, C/S America, Malaysia and south).