Yesterday we took a semi-spontaneous trip to southern Utah to hike The Narrows in Zion National Park. On a day that exceeded 100 degrees, we stayed cool in the shadows of the canyons carved by the Virgin River ...

I wore a Wisconsin Badgers shirt, and several families from Madison hailed us, but it seemed like most of the people in The Narrows were from Europe. We heard lots of Italian and French being spoken, as well as a few British accents. Some of the hikers were walking the river in bare feet, which looked very painful, as the riverbed is filled with large stones. Of course, the stones are mostly smooth, having been worn by the river, so the main risk is twisted ankles.

Unfortunately, I had failed to charge the battery in my camera, and it petered out before we got to the best parts of the hike. Never fear, YouTube to the rescue ...

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Earlier this week, I noted that I was spending some time at Camp Steiner in the High Uintas. I returned home for one day, then got on a plane for Laguna Niguel, California, where I am participating in the Kauffman Summer Legal Institute.

Looking back on Camp Steiner -- it was much more pleasant than I expected. The mud was confined to a few patches, and even though we were told that it would rain every afternoon, I didn't see a drop in two days. Gorgeous blue skies and clear, starry nights. More mosquitoes than I expected for a place that got so cold at night, but we were able to fend most of them off with Deep Woods Off.

I set up my tent on a patch of ground at the top of a slope, so I could look out in the morning and see  distant mountains over the treetops. The scouts were invariably still asleep, so I would reignite the fire from the night before to provide a warm spot in camp. Most of my days were spent hiking around the camp while my boys were in merit badge classes.

The only negatives were the silly skits performed by the camp staff -- an inexplicably standard part of every Scout Camp I have attended -- and the food. I was horrified to learn that our Scoutmaster had packed all of the food for the week in ice. Which meant that we had frozen eggs, frozen milk, frozen everything! I have never seen anyone peel the shells off frozen eggs, then thaw the eggs to make French toast. But it seemed to work.

After less than a day at home, I took at short flight to John Wayne Airport with my wife, where we rented a car and drove south to the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel for the Kauffman SLI. This was a trip down memory lane for us: my first summer associate position was at a small firm in Newport Beach, and we passed briefly by Newport Center Drive on our way. That was 20 years ago (!), and I confess that I don't remember many of the details of this place.

Along the way, I was reminded by a billboard of the strangely fascinating Pageant of the Masters. Had we been thinking ahead, we would have purchased tickets for last night's show. But tonight is booked, and we return home to the nest tomorrow.

I have never been much of a beach person. We walked along the beach yesterday, and we enjoyed seeing the sun sink into the Pacific Ocean last night, but I am perfectly happy to have these experiences only occasionally. Call me crazy, but I much prefer prairies and mountains.

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I am packing for a few days at Camp Steiner with my twins. Camp Steiner is the highest Scout Camp in the United States (elevation 10,400 feet), and the following was taken from a story in the Deseret News last week:

Camp Steiner, a High Uintas Camp in the Great Salt Lake Scout Council, will still open for the season today as planned, despite unusually wet and muddy conditions there....

   Kay Godfrey, spokesman for the Great Salt Lake Council, said Camp Steiner is opening at its regular time.

   "They'll open up just fine," he said. "A little wetter than usual."

He said the camp still has 2 feet of snow under some trees, but the council punched the road through to the camp a few weeks early this year to ensure it dried out.

From flooding in Wisconsin to a typhoon in Hong Kong to this. I am very much counting on my trip to Laguna Niguel on Thursday to salvage my summer travel.

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I arrived in Hong Kong on Sunday night and promptly took 10 hours of sleep. It's Monday morning, and I haven't felt this rested in weeks!

I will be giving a couple of lectures and presenting a working paper while I am here. My oldest son is accompanying me, so we will do a bit of sightseeing and shopping on the off days. Tips, anyone?

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In the next two weeks, I am traveling on American Airlines twice:  once with my daughter to Montreal for the Law & Society Conference and once with my family of five to Washington D.C.  We return on June 9.  Whew.  On June 15, American is going to begin charging a $30 fee to check your bag round-trip if you are flying coach.  Second bags cost $50 round-trip.  Third bags cost $200 round-trip.  Yikes.  For our family's American History tour of Washington D.C., Gettsyburg and Northern Virginia for a week, this would easily cost us an additional $120 for all ticketed passengers to bring one bag, and another $50 for an additional bag I'm sure we'll need for the baby's paraphrenalia.  Then I began to hyperventilate because we have to take a car seat and a stroller.  Thankfully, the policy does not include car seats and strollers, or we'd be out another $100.  So, if we could keep our stuff down to five bags for the five of us, our additional cost would be a mere $170.  (If they were going to charge $100 for car seats and strollers, I'd start a business renting these items right outside airports just like the Cracker Barrel books-on-tape program.)

Aside from just the annoyance of the extra costs (and don't try to suggest that we try to carry-on these five bags, hauling them through the airport with three kids in two), this NYT article asks the most important question:  How, when and where will they collect this charge?  If you go to the ticket counter to check your bag, then the attendant will just accept your payment there, slowing down the ticket line considerably.  And what of all those who check in at home, because they are just carrying on?  As this policy is implemented, everyone will try to carry on more and more luggage.  Then, just as you (who paid $170 at the ticket counter an hour ago) are trying to board, there will be a line of people in the gateway with their oversized bags trying to figure out how to pay the $15 one-way charge.  If the flight attendants don't have change for a $10 for a $5 sandwich, then how are they going to manage these transactions?  American will have to arm them with credit card readers, and that's going to be speedy.  Or, American will have to require everyone to check in, so they can make sure that all bags either fit or have been checked and charged.  Nice.  And let's not forget the overflow at the gateway when every single passenger has a carry on bag, so overhead space disappeared with "Group 1."  I hope that someone looked to see whether these charges are actually worth the extra costs.

OK, enough ranting for me.  I guess I should just be happy planes still fly into Champaign-Urbana.

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Today on my walk home from work I finished listening to "Social Networking 3.0," a podcast over at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. Several young social networking executives talked about the future of social networking (a term they all seemed to dislike), and I was struck by this point of view: social networking can enhance any website.

This was striking to me because I find most online social networking (besides blogging, to the extent that this constitutes "social networking") so clunky and burdensome and unrewarding. I have tried MySpace, Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn, etc. but none of those services has attracted a critical mass of my family and friends. So while I can imagine how online social networking would become meaningful to someone, at the moment the thought of making social networking a pervasive part of the online experience is not appealing to me.

Then again, maybe I just have the wrong attitude about social networking. I am looking for something to enhance my existing relationships, rather than something to find new relationships. This point comes home to me as I read about TripSay, a new travel site out of Finland, which promotes itself by stating: "Tripsay is a community of travelers, where you are presented with tips and ratings based on similarities to other users' profiles." On the one hand, I like the idea of getting tips and ratings from people like me, but I don't want to actually interact with any of those people. Unless I already know them. In short, I don't go to travel sites to meet new people.

So I probably will be avoiding WAYN ("Where Are You Now"), which also emphasizes new relationships. The front page of the site screams, "Make New Friends!" and "Meet people who will be in the same place as you!" Yikes!

Dopplr, "an online tool for frequent business travellers," sounds like a site that is more aligned with my perspective because it is designed primarily as a tool for enhancing existing relationships. As the site states, it works best when "you've already created some trips and have some trusted friends and colleagues with whom you're sharing some trips, and vice versa."

But my new favorite travel site may be the blandest of the bunch. TripIt, a "personal travel assistant that automatically organizes all your travel plans," emphasizes the function of the site as a place to store all of your travel information. The social piece ("Share your trips and see where you overlap with friends and colleagues") seems like an afterthought. With a summer full of travel ahead of me, TripIt seems like just the thing.

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Better safe than sorry? That's the way American Airlines is pitching the flight cancellations today, but the dramatic action of canceling over 1000 flights was the result of years of maintenance neglect. And American isn't the only culprit.

At this point, adding another complaint about the airline industry would be little more than piling on, so I am taking a different tack. What are my options?

I am told that the railroad industry is booming, at least for freight. How about train travel?

Being a Europhile, I enjoy train travel, though living in the West, I am not well situated to execute on this strategy. A round-trip ticket to Chicago costs only $230, but it's 34 hours each way.

When I told my wife the price, she suddenly got interested in visiting a friend in Nashville. Hmm. Nashville doesn't have a train station, but she could get to Memphis ... via Chicago! That means 34 hours to Chicago, then another 10.5 to Memphis.

We could drive, of course, but with the price of gasoline, that doesn't seem like a terribly attractive option.

Plan C: stay home.

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Yesterday I drove into the Uinta National Forest, not far from here, for a Boy Scout winter camp, which insiders call a "Klondike." I am not in the habit of camping in February, but my twin sons were excited about their first winter camp. As I was packing, I asked my wife, "Who in their right mind would voluntarily leave a heated home for the sole purpose of sleeping in the snow?" As it turns out, a couple of hundred Scouts and adult leaders ... though I am not sure any of us was in a right mind.

The other adults in our group were thrilled by the weather: lots of snow and temperatures in the 20s. I grew up in Wisconsin, but even we wouldn't call this "camping weather." Anyway, my boys made a snow shelter (quinsey?), but I opted for a tent. It didn't matter. In the morning, we were all frozen stiff. After some time thawing in front of the fire, we participated in a series of exhilarating activities -- like constructing a tent blindfolded and learning to throw a rope to someone who has fallen through the ice. We ended the day with some hot chili, which was very tasty and a most welcome body warmer.

On the way home, one of my boys observed, "I learned one thing from this: I don't like winter camping." He's a chip off the old block.

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When I rented my automobile in Germany last week, the Avis representative noted that he was charging my credit card in dollars rather than Euros.

"Why are you doing that?"

Blank stare. He was a trainee, and apparently, he had been told to do this.

The office manager, perceiving the standstill, rushed to his aid. "Because some credit cards charge a currency conversion fee. This will avoid that."

"My card doesn't charge that fee. I would like to pay in Euros."

I blogged about such charges after an earlier trip to Germany, after which I acquired a Capital One No Hassle cash Rewards Card. As noted in my prior posts, Capital One not only does not charge a foreign transaction fee, but it also absorbs the fee charged by Visa and MasterCard. (I love it!)

Even if you ignore the fees, it appears that Avis was trying to pull a fast one. After the foregoing exchange, I decided to keep the initial receipt (which showed the charges in dollars) so that I could compare it with the final bill. The actual cost of my one-week rental, including insurance, was $515.26. The cost in dollars would have been $577.39. The primary difference was the result of the poor exchange rate Avis had used to calculate the dollar charge. (Not as bad as exchanging cash in a train station, mind you. That is the traveler's equivalent of a payday loan.)

By the way, the car was the new Ford Mondeo, which got up to 200 km/hr on the Autobahn without any trouble ... other than the fact that it freaked me out to drive that fast. Of course, the German cars were still flying past us.

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After the LSA conference in Berlin, I spent a week touring northern Germany with my oldest daughter, who plans to minor in German at BYU. We rented a car and logged over 1,000 miles -- much of it in one long day of driving in search of a particular souvenir for my wife. Our stops included Luebeck, Hamburg, Hannover, Cologne, and Wiesbaden (because it is close the Frankfurt airport).

In planning the trip, one of the biggest challenges was locating hotels with a decent combination of location, quality, and price. I found this task was aided immensely by TripAdvisor, which ranks hotels based on user reviews. And unlike many sites that depend on user ratings, TripAdvisor actually gets a critical mass of helpful reviews for many hotels.

But the coolest thing about TripAdvisor is the "Check Rates" button. Once you have found your hotel, click the button and get rate quotations from Hotels.com, Expedia, Priceline, and other booking services. After this latest experience, I am sold on Hotels.com, which not only has the best rates, but also sends a reminder email a few days in advance with weather forecasts and other helpful information. Very nice.

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Since I have been spending time in airplanes, one of the things I like to do is read the in-flight magazines, which actually have a lot of interesting stories. The Southwest in-flight magazine began with a letter from Colleen Barrett, president of Southwest. The letter talked about how the company was celebrating July 4th, including various activities occurring during “Freedom Week”—the week of June 28-July 5. What struck me was this paragraph: “Our theme for Freedom Week is “Let Freedom DING!” because we are proud to have brought the Freedom to Fly to America. Of course, that Freedom pales in comparison to those outlined by Thomas Jefferson 231 years ago, but Southwest has freed the skies of the tyranny of high airfares.” As a slogan, it certainly makes a statement.

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Join your friendly bloggers at Conglomerate, along with others from Prawfsblawg and Opinio Juris, for a LSA annual meeting drink on Wednesday night, July 25, at 9. We will be at Delponie No 3. More below the fold ...

It is our first international happy hour and we are pretty excited about it. The locale has food as well as drink, so do come by and say hello, have a bite, or enjoy a lager or a fizzy water.

Here are the details:
Deponie No. 3 is located directly behind Humboldt – in the "Passagen" of the S-Bahn tracks
(i.e., under the tracks). It is at Georgenstrasse 5 (Berlin, Mitte). Here is the website link with a little map showing the location.

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You may have noticed my blog presence missing last week as I took the kids to see family in my hometown of Lubbock, Texas.  When I was in grade school, a popular bumper sticker said "Lubbock or Leave It," and the Dixie Chicks grabbed on to that challenge in a scathing song of the same name on their latest album, Taking the Long Way.  The lyrics present Lubbock as a hypocritical Peyton Place under a thin Bible Belt veneer.  After getting brushed up on the goings-on in my hometown, I would say the veneer is getting thicker and thicker.  Interestingly, I read an article in this month's Texas Monthly on the plane about how The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, campiness aside, was a rather true depiction of the Texas struggle between live and let live libertarians and those who would legislate morality and possibly religion.  At least in Lubbock, the libertarians are losing.

After taking office as mayor, David Miller, was criticized in the media for very quickly going back on campaign promises not to raise taxes.  In response, Mayor Miller asked the area churches to "[p]ray for the media to report  fairly, accurately, fully, and unemotionally. Commentaries from both TV and radio have been less than any of these. I don't mind the heat, but our city doesn't benefit from such divisive and slanted editorializing."  (Last summer, he also declared a day to pray for rain.  This summer is actually too wet, so maybe he'll pray for clear skies.)  In February, the Chippendale's dancers, who had sold out three shows, were arrested after starting their first show.  In May, Lubbock police used a dusty Texas law to arrest the clerk of a lingerie store for having six or more sexual devices for sale (Class A Misdemeanor).  If the clerk is convicted, he will have to register as a sex offender.  Lubbock County had also denied renewals of sexually oriented business permits to three "strip clubs," but a federal district court judge last week granted the clubs an injunction allowing them to continue operating after finding that the plaintiffs were likely to be able to prove that the renewal process was unconstitutional.

Interestingly, the letters to the editor of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal were virtually all against the new priorities in Lubbock's small law enforcement budget.  Some even pointed out that with so many unsolved murders, particularly murders of women, this war against sex toys and shows was a waste of resources.   

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Randall Stross retells the story of Christopher Soghoian, a Ph.D. student in the School of Informatics at Indiana University and his "Northwest Airlines Boarding Pass Generator": "A visitor to the site could plug in any name, and Mr. Soghoian’s software would create a page suitable for printing with a facsimile of a boarding pass, identical in appearance to one a passenger who had bought a Northwest Airlines ticket would generate when using the airline's at-home check-in option."

Soghoian wanted to "demonstrate that the T.S.A. Boarding Pass/ID check is useless." Indeed.

We have been harsh critics of our silly airport security system (here and here), and Stross offers this suggestion for improvement from Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer at BT Counterpane, a security consulting firm in Mountain View, California:

When I asked Mr. Schneier of BT Counterpane what he would do if he were appointed leader of the T.S.A., he said he would return to the basic procedures for passenger screening used before the 2001 terrorist attacks, which was designed to do nothing more ambitious than "catch the sloppy and the stupid."

He said he would also ensure that passengers' bags fly only if the passenger does, improve emergency response capabilities and do away entirely with ID checks and secret databases and no-fly and selectee lists. He added that he would shift funds into basic investigation and intelligence work, which he believes produces results like the arrests of the London bomb suspects. "Put smart, trained officers in plainclothes, wandering in airports — that is by far the best thing the T.S.A. could do," he said.

Amen!

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Further to my earlier rant on flight delays and airlines' failure to disclose them in timely fashion, Delta has just started a new service that reports flight delays to your designated phone number or email address.  According to a press release, the new service

will notify customers when their flights are delayed and provide continuous, real-time updates when operational changes occur, such as rebooking options or gate changes.

I've just subscribed to the service, so I can't yet say  whether notifications will be timely.  But it's certainly a step in the right direction.  As I wrote previously, this seems in the airline's interest as well as the passengers': 

[I]s it that costly to disclose the departure delay in advance? Presumably, some passengers would find alternative flights, and Delta couldn’t impose cancellation penalties for flight commitments it couldn’t fulfill, right? Even assuming that’s right, it seems to me that it still might be profit maximizing for Delta to disclose early. First off, under current pricing practices, it would probably be difficult for most passengers to find a palatable fare on an alternative airline on such short notice, so there won’t be many cancellations—except for those passengers who simply decide not to fly that day.  Second, wouldn’t a policy of early disclosure offer enormous marketing advantages? If an airline always disclosed flight delays as early as possible, I would certainly favor that airline over its less helpful competitors. Even if it didn’t enable me to switch flights, I would appreciate the information for planning purposes.

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The NYT has an article today about how working moms view business travel as mini-vacations away from household obligations.  While killing time between appointments, moms may see old friends, get haircuts, or just enjoy peaceful downtime in quiet hotel rooms.  The flipside of this article is a statement about how women multitask even business trips -- getting things done on trips that otherwise are harder to get done.  I know that while on business trips I have done some shopping (kid's clothes, gifts) that was on my global to-do list.

However, when my children were very small, I remember the joy of sleeping in a king-sized bed all to myself, all night long, without anyone trying to sneak in and sleep sideways the rest of the night.  I also enjoyed going to restaurants and not having to eat quickly (just entrees, and may we have the check now please?) before the youngest one melted down.  Even now when my homelife isn't in baby survival, lock-down mode, I find myself on business trips laying awake in my hotel room watching Law & Order until 1:00 a.m. just because I can.

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I had the displeasure this weekend of flying Delta to Toronto (for CLEA), and having my early morning flights delayed both coming and going. What was unusual, in my experience, was that in both cases, Delta personnel informed us passengers that the reason for the delay was that the flight crew hadn’t shown up, and the reason they hadn’t shown up was that they had gotten in late the night before. Because flight crews are required to have a certain number of hours of rest between flights, my flights were delayed because the assigned crews could not (legally?) work the flights at the scheduled times. 

Now, in these situations, presumably Delta knows well in advance of the scheduled flight time—at least sometime the evening before the flight, and perhaps even earlier—that the assigned crew cannot work the early morning flight at the appointed time, and that if unless another crew is substituted, the flight has to depart late. But on my outbound flight, no advance announcement of any departure delay was ever indicated on the flight schedule, either on Delta’s website or in the terminal. Instead, the gate agents simply kept pushing back the departure time in fifteen-minute intervals—five or six times—explaining each time only that the crew had not arrived. So at the time, I’m thinking, “Gee, usually when you show up really late for work, they fire you.” It wasn’t until we eventually got on the plane that the pilot explained over the PA system why the crew was late.  At least for my 6:20AM return flight the next morning, the delay was posted on the internet flight schedule. Except I didn’t check it until I had already woken up at 4:00AM, showered and gotten dressed and packed for the airport. Ugh.

So this experience prompts a few questions. First, is it out of the question for Delta to find a substitute crew to work the early flight? Do (all) other airlines put the risk of insufficient crew rest hours from the previous day on the next day’s morning passengers? Note this is a little different from having to wait for your plane to arrive and unload its arriving passengers. Here, the airline has at least a good 8 or 10 or 12 hours’ notice of the possible delay, and presumably finding a substitute crew is easier and cheaper than finding a substitute plane. Sure, finding another crew in these situations will increase operating costs. But I’m sure as heck not going to choose Delta next time if another option is available. (It might turn out to be no better—or even worse—than Delta, but I’m happy to give it a shot.)

Second, is it that costly to disclose the departure delay in advance? Presumably, some passengers would find alternative flights, and Delta couldn’t impose cancellation penalties for flight commitments it couldn’t fulfill, right? Even assuming that’s right, it seems to me that it still might be profit maximizing for Delta to disclose early. First off, under current pricing practices, it would probably be difficult for most passengers to find a palatable fare on an alternative airline on such short notice, so there won’t be many cancellations—except for those passengers who simply decide not to fly that day.  Second, wouldn’t a policy of early disclosure offer enormous marketing advantages? If an airline always disclosed flight delays as early as possible, I would certainly favor that airline over its less helpful competitors. Even if it didn’t enable me to switch flights, I would appreciate the information for planning purposes. I’m no expert on the cost structure. Am I missing something?

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Having grown up in Wisconsin, I cherish the autumn colors. So this afternoon I took some of my children on a drive to the central part of the state, where the trees are still a week or two from their peak colors, but still beautiful.

We passed by some cranberry bogs, which are very close to being harvested. When you look closely, you can see thousands of red berries nestled beneath the vines. At harvest time, the bogs are flooded, and the berries rise to the top. In the meantime, we caught these three Great Blue Herons moving from one field to another (leaving a baby bird, outside the photo, in their wake).

Perhaps the most exciting sight of the day, however, was a pair of Pileated Woodpeckers, working over a dead tree alongside the road in the Necedah Wildlife Refuge. One of the birds flew across the road as I was driving, and I immediately whipped the car around for a closer look. We were quite close, in fact, but it was dusk, and my lack of skill as a photographer resulted in this blurry photo of one of the birds.

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Are you obsessed with finding the cheapest gas prices? Relax. Or change your obsession to pharmacy items: "if I spend about $25 a month at a convenience store, I stand to save more money by switching to someplace like Walmart or Target than I would by switching to a cheaper (or even the cheapest) gas station."

So why are we so focused on gas prices? Is this the explanation?

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I am sitting in my hotel room in Tucson, Arizona, having spent the last couple of days with Darian Ibrahim and his colleagues at the University of Arizona, who are creating a new law and entrepreneurship program. (Darian will be guest blogging here in October, and I hope he will share some of his plans for the program, as well as his research in the area.) They have a lot of good things going on down here. Even the weather has been mild.

Normally, I would have flown back to Wisconsin this morning, but tonight Tucson is hosting a nationally televised football game between my alma mater, BYU, and the University of Arizona. Both teams have been down recently, but both are counting on this to be a statement year for their young coaches. I am expecting a close game, even though I am hoping for a BYU blowout.

Darian and his wife, Jamie, have been kind enough to invite this hopeless Cougar fan to attend the game. No, I haven't painted my chest, but if BYU wins, you may see me storming the field.

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I arrived in Utah today after spending the last two days on the road with my oldest daughter, who will be attending BYU this fall, and one of her younger brothers, who is eager to get to Yellowstone Park! I have driven all of the major interstate highways between Wisconsin and Utah many times, so there were no surprises. Though I have learned to love the openness of the plains, I most enjoy seeing the mountains again. Spectacular!

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Farecast, an airline fare forecasting service, is finally available nationwide in beta. Unfortunately, it includes only 55 airports, and Madison is not on the list, though I requested it with the "Add My City" button. Among other cool features on the site is the ability to track a trip through RSS feeds.

Check it out.

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I have just returned from a trip to South Africa and it was incredible. It took almost 20 hours to travel from the DC area to Johannesburg, but it was well worth it. The country is a breathtaking mix of old and new. In Cape Town we visited a mall that could have been in any American city, complete with many of your traditional stores and fast food restaurants. Corporate America definitely has a firm position in South Africa.

The landscape was amazing, from beautiful mountains to fantastic sunsets and beaches (many of which American companies use to film movies because it is cheaper—in fact we saw a movie being filmed as we passed a beach in Cape Town). We also got a glimpse of the gold and diamond minds for which South Africa is famous. We visited Cape Point, the southern tip of Africa where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet. We also got a chance to go on safari. I saw the full range of African animals including elephants, giraffes, zebras, cheetahs, and lions. Our ranger told us that if a lion approaches you out in the open, you should stand your ground, because all of the lion’s food runs away from it—thus by running you indicate that you are his food. I am happy I did not have to test that notion.

And of course the country is rich in political history. We visited Robben Island—the political prison where Nelson Mandela and others were kept. The government imposed a system of apartheid even in the prison, such as giving prisoners different quantities of food based on their race. In Soweto we visited the house Mandela lived before and immediately after prison—he apparently had to move because he got daily visitors to his house beginning very early in the morning. We also visited the Hector Pieterson museum—dedicated to commemorate the student protest in Soweto (which resulted in over 500 children being killed) and named after one of the first children killed during the student march. Our guide showed us the Regina Mundi church, where students used to meet and that still had bullet holes in the ceilings and windows because police used to storm their meetings. Finally, we visited the Apartheid museum—which chronicles the history of apartheid and the struggle, both domestically and internationally, to overcome it. When you finish touring the museum, you feel a sense of awe as well as the power of the human spirit.

We had several guides and we asked them what they saw as the difference between their lives during apartheid and now. They all responded the same way—today they have the freedom to go wherever they want. During apartheid, black South Africans had to carry passes that restricted their movement, and a person could be immediately imprisoned if he failed to carry the pass. Our guide in Cape Town told us that although he grew up in Cape Town, there were parts of the city he had never seen, and thus he was almost learning it for the first time with us. Truly amazing. And now I have to try to shake off my jet lag!

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Yesterday, I agreed to present a paper at Steve Bainbridge's UCLA Corporate Governance Colloquium. Steve is a great guy, and I look forward to spending some time with him -- not to mention going to SoCal from the depths of Wisconsin's winter -- but in all honesty, the first thought that came to mind when he called was, "Another plane trip? Could I combine this with something else I already have planned?"

News this morning of a foiled terrorist plot in Britain has upped the ante on security again, and the U.S. is now banning liquids from carry-ons. Ann wonders whether this might signal the "end of carry-on luggage -- even a purse?" I had the same thought. Carry-ons are history.

Driving was never a convenient option for long trips, but it had the virtue of being relatively cheap. With the price of gasoline headed for $4 a gallon, driving is no longer that.

Of course, there's always cycling. But for me, riding to work is close to the outer boundary of that technology.

Which brings me to my latest resolution: displace travel with technology. I always have found face-to-face meetings quite useful in forming and maintaining professional relationships, but we are entering an era in which such meetings will become increasingly precious. Fortunately, advances in technology are picking up some of the slack. Internet telephony has advanced by leaps and bounds in recent years, effectively eliminating the concept of "long distance telephone calls." Video conferencing, too, is now cheaper and more convenient than ever.

The times they are a-changin'.

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Let's say that you have a job that allows you to travel during the summer. You do most of your work online, so as long as you have an internet connection, you can be anywhere. And let's say that you  love all of Europe, but you prefer to focus on one country per summer, rather than hopping around.

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Not Hertz, which is what I would have thought, but Enterprise, according to Fortune magazine.  Some interesting factoids about the privately held firm.  It's annual revenues are about $9BB, compared to $7.5BB for Hertz.  And it's been the revenue leader since the late '90s.  Enterprise is also the largest car buyer in the world and the largest employer of college graduates.  The article does a nice job of outlining Enterprise's business model.

I generally rent from Hertz when I'm on business, even though it's probably the priciest of the major rental companies, even with my university discount.  The cars all seem fairly new, and it's relatively convenient for airport pickup.  But I'm open to switching:  I'm always surprised at the pricing gap compared to the other major rental companies.  Any thoughts?

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On a recent Citi MasterCard statement, I found the following entry:

PURCHASES*FINANCE CHARGE*FOREIGN TRANS

Maybe I am the last international traveler on earth to discover this sort of charge, which relates to purchases that I made in Germany. Now that I am aware of it, I am seeing information about it all over the place (e.g., here). Like many credit card issuers, Citi adds a 1% surcharge for all purchases that require currency conversion. That's in addition to the 1% charge levied by MasterCard (or Visa, as the case may be), which actually handles the currency conversion.

Being one of the many people who never reads the fine print on my credit card agreements, I probably would have remained blissfully unaware of this charge, but Citi's customer service representative told me that a new regulation now requires separate disclosure of such fees. Knowledge is power. Digging a bit further, I discovered that Capital One not only does not charge a fee, but it also absorbs the fee charged by Visa and MasterCard. Bankrate.com has a nice comparison chart.

Maybe I should check with credit card guru Ronald Mann first (are you reading today, Ronald?), but Capital One looks like a great credit card for a whole bunch of reasons. In any event, I am ready to bid Citi adieu.

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(If anyone missed me on the Glom,) I've just returned from a family vacation at Hilton Head Island in the lowlands of South Carolina.  It is a wonderful spot for families with young children--our group had 2 four-year-olds and 2 two-year-olds.  The beach is flat and wide; the waves are very mild, almost subtle.  And the slope of the shore is so gradual that even toddlers can comfortably wade twenty feet into the water.  There appeared to be a lot of vacant rentals over Memorial Day weekend, which means good availability at reasonable prices.  Many rental houses, including the one we rented, have a pool in the backyard.  So the two biggest decisions of the day are what/where to eat and whether to go to the pool or the beach!

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Has anyone around here mentioned how much we despise air travel? Oh, yeah. And here and here. But see.

This morning, my flight from Boston to Detroit was delayed by about an hour for maintenance problems. This was a 6 am flight ... one of the first flights of the new day! Why is Northwest lining up defective planes for the first flights?!

Anyway, the delay caused me to miss my connection to Madison, which means that I am blogging this from the lovely Northwest terminal in Detroit.

En route to Detroit, I was reading David Hoffman's law review article, The "Duty" to be a Rational Investor, 90 Minn. L. Rev. 537 (2006), which rehearses the various cognitive biases that have become part of the standard account in behavioral law and economics. The message: investors are irrational.

Fresh on the heels of that, I was given this choice:

• Leave Detroit at noon and arrive in Madison at 3:30 pm ... via O'Hare, or
• Leave Detroit at 5:00 pm and arrive in Madison at 5:30 pm (direct flight).

Which would you take? I took the second option. When is the last time you went through O'Hare in the middle of the afternoon without some sort of catastrophe?

In the meantime, I am hoping to board a direct flight to Madison at noon. I am the first name on standby.

UPDATE: Well, my standby strategy failed. The flight was overbooked. Fifteen minutes prior to boarding, it looked like one seat would be open, and they called me to the counter. But alas, the passenger showed up about 10 minutes before the plane was scheduled to take off.

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I am spending the next couple of days in Eagle River, Wisconsin -- "Where Great Times Come With the Territory!" I am taking my children snowmobiling for the first time. We had hoped to do this over the holidays, but the warm weather thwarted us. Now, we are seizing the opportunity provided by the recent blizzard. I assume blogging over the next few days will be light ...

UPDATE: That photo above could have been taken on Saturday morning, as two of my sons and I returned the snowmobiles to the rental company. We departed our cabin in darkness at 6 am and rode for two hours, watching the sun rise over a tree-lined horizon. We were the first snowmobilers on the trail, which the groomer had just shaped into a smooth white ribbon through the woods. At one point, I noticed fresh deer tracks on the trail. I stopped my sled and looked to the right, where I saw a herd of about ten does staring back at me from 20 yards. Truth be told, I felt guilty at disrupting their morning with that noisy machine. Although I probably would have preferred to be hiking at that moment, it was pretty exciting to travel 60 mph across a frozen lake or open field.

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As if NM Governor Bill Richardson wasn't already going to have to answer hard questions about his so-called MLB career should he make a presidential run, now he seems to be proud of the fact that the state of New Mexico is going to sink $200 million into a commercial spaceport.  From living in West Texas and peering over the border, I would say that NM doesn't have a lot of million-dollar bills to be throwing around to build Richard Branson's launch pad.  Branson's Virgin Galactic plans to host commercial "sub orbital" space flights for paying customers, some of whom have already paid deposits. 

The governmental line is that the state seeks to profit from tourism spawned by the space flights.  (The state will not receive taxes from the flights.)  However, this spaceport is not being built near Santa Fe or even Ruidoso.  It is being built near Las Cruces.  Now, being from Lubbock, I can't knock anyone's city, but I'm not sure how many really rich people are going to want to hang out in Las Cruces.  (The flights cost $200,000 per person.)  If I were a NM taxpayer, I think I would just let Mr. Branson build his own spaceport.

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Note the high quality of the hair braiding.

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Sometime tomorrow our family will embark on our biggest vacation since Paul's and my honeymoon -- we're going to Disney World!  First, we're going on a 3-night Disney cruise, then we'll round out our week in Orlando at the Magic Kingdom theme park.    My feelings alternate between joy and elation on the one hand and icy fear on the other.  If you have Disney advice, be sure to share in the comments.  If your advice involves "Turn back!  Don't go!" then keep it to yourself because we've gone too far.  Yes, I understand the concept of sunk costs, but I also understand how much it would cost me to tell a certain 4-year-old boy that we were not having his birthday on the Disney cruise.

Here's hoping for no hurricanes and no pirates except for Captain Hook and that Johnny Depp guy.

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My colleague Nina Camic is photoblogging from one of my favorite cities, Vienna, where I served a Mormon mission over 20 years ago. Servus, Nina!

I feel compelled to note, however, that her reference to "afternoon delight" is not what the Starland Vocal Band had in mind when they sang those words.

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When I am traveling, I try to wear my slip-on Timberlines because they can make it through airport security without difficulty. And if I am required to remove my shoes, they do not pose a big hassle.

Sometimes, however, I am dressing up and packing light and take only one pair of dress shoes for the whole trip. In the past on such occasions, I wore a pair of Johnston & Murphy shoes, which have metal in the sole. One day, a helpful security official told me that Allen Edmonds manufactures shoes with a plastic insert precisely to facilitate getting through airport security. I was quite pleased, therefore, to stumble upon an Allen Edmonds tent sale a few weeks back, and I snatched up a pair of black dress shoes.

On the way to Kansas City, my shoes performed beautifully, passing through security in Madison without a hitch. Unfortunately, today in Kansas City, one of the TSA officials decided to make all of us remove our shoes. I mentioned that my shoes did not contain metal, and he responded, "We are looking at the width of the sole." Arrgh!

This is from the TSA website:

        TSA Shoe Screening Policy    

You are not required to remove your shoes before you enter the walk-through metal detector.

        HOWEVER, TSA screeners may encourage you to remove them before entering the metal detector as many types of footwear will require additional screening even if the metal detector DOES NOT alarm.       

Screeners will encourage you to remove the following footwear that is likely to require additional screening:

• Boots 
• Platform shoes (including platform flip-flops)
• Footwear with a thick sole or heel (including athletic shoes)
• Footwear containing metal (including many dress shoes)

Footwear that screeners are less likely to suggest you remove includes:

• "Beach" flip-flops
• Thin-soled sandals (without metal)

So it seems that the TSA has given screeners some discretion to request removal on the ground that my soles are too thick.

Notice that I am not required to remove my shoes. The screener may encourage me or suggest that I remove them ... but I can refuse?  So I wonder what would happen if my response were, "I would rather not take my shoes off, but thanks for your concern. Excuse me, may I pass now?" (Of course, I would never do that because I appreciate that the screeners are just trying to do a job, but I really hate the hassle of removing and replacing dress shoes.)

UPDATE: This should be classified under "things you don't realize you are revealing." After reading this post, one of our readers wrote, "I wonder, do we both have wide feet?" He made the inference from the brands that I wear.

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Being from Lubbock, I always get asked about the song "Happiness was Lubbock, Texas in my Rear-View Mirror."  I think for many people today that song is more applicable to Houston.  Even though most parts of Houston are not under a mandatory evacuation order, anyone who has been watching the news the past month has decided not to take any chances and are heading out of town.  Houston has closed schools and businesses for today and tomorrow.  We know of one wedding that was cancelled because One Shell Plaza and the restaurant on top is closing.  But, how do you get one or two million people out of Houston?  Very, very slowly.  According to the Houston Chronicle, travelling from a southern suburb to the farthest northern suburb, normally an hour to an hour-and-a-half drive, took 13 hours yesterday.  Today, the city is going to reverse the traffic on major freeways so that they all go in the direction of "out."  Good luck, guys.

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Ever wonder what economic effect those long lines have?  These guys can tell you.

Not surprisingly, increased screening drives down air travel demand.  Pointless and excessive screening is the non-obvious way of letting the terrorists win.   We should take some of the money dedicated to screening (whether in the form of cash outlays or silly rules that lead to welfare losses) and reallocate it to better uses.

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I flew in to National Airport today on United.  I usually enjoy the approach over the Potomac, with the view of the monuments on the left ... this time, though, right before we would have touched down, the pilot gunned the engines and pulled up.  Sure got my adrenaline going.  We climbed up back into the pattern, circled around, did the Potomac approach again, and landed.  Phew.

The guy next to me swears he didn't hear them put the landing gear down the first time.  Somehow I doubt that, but who knows.  It seems more likely that there was a plane taxi-ing on the runway, or maybe we weren't lined up quite right.  It didn't seem particularly windy or bumpy.  Do pilots get the yips, like golfers do with putting?

After the second (actual) landing, the flight attendant tried to cheer us with some Southwest / Jet Blue style humor:  "We have now definitely landed at Washington Reagan National Airport.  The local time is approximately 4 pm ... Even with our abort landing, we have arrived more or less on time ... We understand that you have many, many bankrupt airlines to choose from, and we appreciate your choosing United ..."

Ha ha.  Is "abort landing" sort of like a "water landing"?  Next time, maybe they'll joke about pension-less maintenance workers throwing sand in the landing gear. 

No matter how funny they try to make it, flying is not a pleasant experience these days.  When it comes to flying, I'll start looking for the humorless, competent airline. 

I was reading earlier about the mindset of the class of 2009.  It just occurred to me that none of my law students would remember this. I find it hard to forget.

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Eric Goldman properly complains about airline announcements and notes,

I mention all of this because, on my last flight from San Jose to Chicago, I saw at least a half-dozen passengers using noise-canceling headphones. I tend to be a late adopter of technology (i.e., I still don't own a cellphone), but I've already queued this up on my wish list. With these headphones, I wouldn't care how many announcements the airline made; I could just tune them out and blissfully sleep/work away. I'm waiting for the price to come down, but I will definitely be getting a set.

I hate to break the news, Eric, but noise canceling headphones do not completely solve the problem of unnecessary airline announcements.

I have had a set of Bose headphones for about a year (I have heard that cheaper brands work as well, but I have not verified the claim), and they do a very good job of canceling out the hum of the airplane engines.  But the headphones are designed to cancel out white noise, not voices. So if the lawyer in the row behind you is screaming into his cell phone while you sit delayed on the runway, you will hear him.  And often you will hear the unnecessary announcements (Do I really need to know everyone's gate connection?  Is it that hard to find a monitor?).  In fact -- this is what makes the technology so interesting -- you can pretty much have a conversation in a normal tone of voice with the person next to you. 

My solution is to beat the airlines' white noise with better white noise.  You can plug the headphones into your Ipod, and with the noise of the airplane engine dimmed, you can listen to music at low volume and still concentrate on work.  (Incidentally, tablet PCs are esp. good for airplanes; when fIying coach, it's difficult to open up a full size laptop on the little tray table.)   

During takeoff and landing, however, when electronic devices must be turned off, there's nothing you can do but suffer. 

I have noticed that Mark Tushnet, who sits across the hall from me, works all day with his Bose headphones on.  Maybe that's the secret to his amazing productivity ...

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Eric Goldman has some thoughts on whether airline announcements are necessary or spam-ish.  His thoughts point out the divide between infrequent fliers and at least occasional fliers.  I noticed this divide among my three flights yesterday in between Lubbock, TX and Milwaukee.  I travel with my two kids, 3 and 6.  In my extreme desire not to inconvenience others in the security line, we are dressed as if visiting an inmate in a federal prison.  We wear sneakers, no belts, no jewelry.  We carry no change.  We take off our shoes in the line and carry them to the security machine.

However, the couple in front of us had not gotten the post-9/11 memo.  They both wore metal-tipped cowboy boots and metal belts.  Between them, they tried to go through security with one extra large pocket knife and three lighters.  The man had about $4 in nickels and pennies in assorted pockets.  As I was wondering to myself whether they had been to an airport in the last four years, I was struck by the fact that 9/11 was four years ago.  Wow.

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We left Philmont this morning after my two oldest children returned from their mountain treks all bubbly about their experiences. After they showered, we drove away from the ranch, and we asked each of them, "Are you a different person now than you were a week ago?" My oldest daughter immediately replied, "Absolutely." She had not been at all excited about the prospect of wilderness hiking, and now she is talking about returning to Philmont next year to work on the staff. (My son was onboard with the experience from the start, but even his high expectations were not disappointed.)

I spent most of the week hiking, averaging 5-10 miles per day. It was great exercise in a magnificent place, but I was ready for something new by week's end. Truth be told, it wasn't the hiking that tried my patience, but the Scout leaders. Nice people, but if you are the type of person who has to own the DVD of Follow Me, Boys!, we probably aren't going to have a meaningful conversation.

One of my favorite parts of the week was the bird watching. Although I have not taken a serious interest in birding, I am a casual bird lover, and I snapped some photos of Philmont birds, including this one, which I was told is an oriole, though I can't find a good match on this list of New Mexico birds.

If you recognize this bird, could you let me know whether it is really an oriole? You can also see a red-tailed hawk and hummingbirds. And if you are interested, check out the doe and fawn that I stumbled across on a very short hike on my first day. (They were so close they actually scared me. I was wondering if I had ever seen a news story of a man being trampled by a doe.)

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While the rest of the United States is talking about the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court, campers at Philmont are abuzz about another subject: Harry Potter. Between sessions, people are reading at picnic tables or on the cots inside their tents. Staff members carry the distinctive purple book around the camp, looking for an opportunity to read a quick chapter here or there. While we talk to each other generally about the Harry Potter series, we are careful not to reveal too much about this book.

The other topic that seems to get a reaction on every hike is the Tour de France. Lance Armstrong has raised the profile of cycling to incredible heights in the U.S., and I am interested to see how many people will be interested next year after Lance has exited the scene.

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