This picture is from my 2017 trip to My Fifieth: Hawaii. I had to fly there, of course, and I also did some flying between islands while there. On my seventieth birthday, I did some flying in a helicopter over volcanos on the Big Island which is when the picture at right was taken. Oahu and Maui were the other islands visited. On Oahu, I made it to the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, climbed Diamond Head, and strolled on Waikiki Beach. I did enough driving, including Maui’s Road to Hana, to allow me to call this a road trip of sorts. I watched surfers but had enough sense not to try it myself. In fact, I did nothing on top of the water but did go 111 feet beneath it in a submersible with plenty of windows. I ate SPAM at McDonald’s, Fleetwood’s mac & cheese at Mick’s place, one Mix Plate, one Loco Moco, and quite a few macadamia nut pancakes. I made it to within 300 feet of the southernmost point in the USA, had a couple of brews at the country’s southernmost brewery (Kona), and a few more at breweries that were pretty far south. Every state in the union is unique but this place just might be uniquer than most.

As the trip’s title indicates, Hawaii was the fiftieth state I’d visited. The trip cleared the way for me to publish 50 @ 70 which includes some coverage of trips that took me to the final sixteen of that fifty. Not too surprisingly, Hawaii and Alaska (my 49th) get the most attention.

Trip Peeks are short articles published when my world is too busy or too boring for a current events piece to be completed in time for the Sunday posting. In addition to a photo thumbnail from a completed road trip, each Peek includes a brief description of that photo plus links to the full-sized photo and the associated trip journal.