Adventures in Time Travel

In no way am I suggesting we hoped in any DeLorean and flashed back to the past. This was real time travel. Two places that were removed from the time line the rest of the world travels on. These two places are the Island of Molokai and the Diamond Head Crater Festival, both of which I traveled through time to reach back in 2006.

The Island of Molokai. There will be another story on Molokai later, now I just want to cover the time travel aspects of the trip. The tourism web site for Molokai describes it as the island lost in time, and describes traveling there to stepping back in time 50 years. I say this is a bit of an exaggeration, but being only 23 I don't know what things were like 50 years ago, let alone in Hawaii. But I will say its like stepping back about 20 to 30 years at least for being part of the United States.

We arrived at the airport on a prop plane, the runway is to small for jets. We walked from the plane about 100 feet over to the baggage claim. The baggage claim consisted of a roof, one wall and 4 large wooden benches opposite the wall. Not sure how we got our bags, being that there was no baggage carousel, we looked out at the plane 100 feet away to see a n old john deer with a trailer pulling up to the plane. After all the bags were in the trailer the tractor drove into the baggage claim behind the benches and unloaded the bags neatly onto the benches.

The island of Molokai has one main town and one main road running for west to east. The main super market looks more like a country store.

The best part time travel wise for me was at the airport on the way out of Molokai. As we waited at our gate what I believe to be a DC 3 cargo plane pulled up. It is one of those WW2 era planes that when parked is at about a 30 degree angle nose up. Well the pilot has a side window which he opened up and gave a shocka to the air traffic control tower to let them know he was parked.

The Crater Festival was an entirely different situation. The Festival dates back to the 70s when it was a free music festival. It was the Woodstock of the Pacific. April 2006 was to be the first Crater Festival in about 30 years. The Diamond Head Crater is a place normally crawling with tourist. As a result of high ticket prices $130 for the lawn and classic rock lineup the festival mostly drew the people who where there 30 years prior that wanted to relive the glory days. This combination of factors made it feel like once we were though the tunnel into the crater we were back in the late 70s. This made for the perfect atmosphere to listen to Steve Miller rock.