It has been three years since we took our last vacation, and 26 years since we took a vacation without our children. Since economic circumstances prevented me from taking Pam on a dream 25th anniversary trip last year, I managed to talk her into taking that trip with me this year. We referred to it as our long-delayed honeymoon. The one compromise she made was agreeing to spend a week with me and a bunch of other Libertarians. She decided that was a sacrifice she was willing to accept.

So, on January 29, 2011 we boarded a Virgin America flight to Ft. Lauderdale to join the Reason Cruise, a seven day adventure in the Caribbean promoting free minds and free markets. The cruise was co-sponsored by the Seasteading Institute, and I like to think I had a hand in making this happen.  In September 2009, I gave a brief 15 minute presentation at the second Seasteading Conference at the Cathedral Hill Hotel in San Francisco proposing that a future Seasteading Conference should ideally be held on the open sea. I suggested we could choose from several inexpensive four or five day cruises sailing from Southern California to various Mexican resorts on the Pacific Coast, as well as some more expensive itineraries to Alaska, Canada, or for the highest rollers, the Mediterranean. I highlighted cruises sailing out of Venice, and touted that unique city as an example of fifth century seasteading, an independent republic built on a lagoon in 451 A.D. that still endures as a monument to human ingenuity and creativity, born in the wake of terrible wars and out of a necessity for peace and security.  I referred to the Venetians as the first Seasteaders, proving more than a thousand years ago that Seasteading is not only possible, but practical.

The Institute didn’t decide immediately to take this route, but chose instead to join with the Reason Foundation to co-sponsor a cruise very similar to what I proposed, but in a different ocean. I was thrilled to learn of this and when I suggested to Pam that I wanted to go, it didn’t take much to convince her to come along.  It did require some careful financial planning and budget management, but we figured out how to make this work, and it was certainly worth the sacrifice.

We arrived on Saturday night and enjoyed a small reception at the Airport Hilton Hotel with other guests including Reason.tv editor in chief Nick Gillespie and Reason Magazine editor Matt Welch. I’d only met Nick once before, at a book signing in the East Bay several years ago, but hadn’t met anyone else on the staff. The next morning, we had a pleasant breakfast, checked out of our room and met everyone else in front of the hotel and boarded the chartered bus that took us to Port Everglades, where our cruise ship was docked.

Celebrity Solstice in Port Everglades

Boarding the Celebrity Solstice was an unexpected challenge, as we were shuffled through a gigantic queue multiple times between different rooms in the port building.  Our luggage was color coded and left for inspection outside the building while we stood in line for almost two and a half hours.  After checking in with the Celebrity Cruise staff and signing a Public Health Service affirmation that we were feeling healthy and had not been exposed to anyone with H1N1 influenza symptoms for the previous 72 hours, we continued to wait patiently while the line moved with agonizing slowness in rows that snaked all through the complex.  When questioned about the delay, staff insisted that they knew nothing more than we did about the problem, and hurried back and forth to find chairs for guests who physically could not stand up for extended periods of time.  The rest of us either sat down on the floor or tried to lean on something, but neither of these alternatives could be enjoyed for very long, as the line would move 30 or 40 feet every ten minutes or so.

Eventually, we were notified that a large number of passengers on the cruise that had just disembarked from the ship had fallen ill from a norovirus outbreak, and the entire vessel was being given a top to bottom, stem to stern disinfection before anyone would be allowed to board.  It was a relief to finally discover the reason for the delay, and to know that the crew was taking no chances with the safety of the new guests, but it would have been helpful if this information had been provided several hours earlier, as it might have made the increasingly annoyed crowd more understanding of the situation.   When we were finally given clearance to board, everyone was required to be squirted with Purell hand sanitizer, but then we were greeted with champagne, white wine or fruit juice as we stepped off the gangplank, served by polite staff all wearing gloves.

Everything was immediately better. After finding our way to Deck 12, where the pool was located, we found more cold beverages to help hydrate our weary bodies and sat down to rest for a while.  It was quite pleasant here, but very hot and humid, so we were glad when we heard the announcement that we should make our way inside to the Solstice Theatre on Deck 4 to participate in the mandatory “muster drill.”  This is a presentation given at the beginning of all cruises to orient passengers to the ship’s safety features and standard emergency practices.  They thanked us for our patience with the enhanced precautions in the wake of the norovirus outbreak and advised us that regular frequent handwashing is the most effective method for preventing the spread of communicable diseases.   When we were dismissed from the muster drill, we were allowed to visit our staterooms, where our luggage had been delivered.  On our budget, we could only afford an inside stateroom, but our inside cabin wasn’t significantly smaller than the Hilton hotel room from the previous night, and since we didn’t expect to be spending much of our waking hours here, the lack of a window didn’t make much difference to me, but Pam says we will have to get a room with a window, if not a full veranda, the next time we take a cruise.

Stateroom 8165

Due to the extensive disinfection procedures, our 4:30 p.m. departure was delayed, and we didn’t actually set sail out of Port Everglades until at least 7:00 p.m.  We found our way to Deck 14 and checked in with Amy Pelletier, the coordinator of the Reason Cruise and picked up our conference packages, name badges, schedule of events, Reason tote bags and T-shirts.  She then invited us to attend a private cocktail reception in the Sky Lounge on the starboard side of Deck 14.   The Sky Lounge was a sleek, futuristic looking bar surrounded by windows providing guests with a breathtaking view of the ocean.  Here we met more Reason cruisers who had not stayed at our hotel in Ft. Lauderdale, like Patri and Tovar Friedman, Danielle Strachman, and James Hogan from the Seasteading Institute and many others who would become familiar to us over the week. We had a lovely evening meeting new friends like Tom Kimmel, from Michigan, Ken and Heather Buckland from Hawaii, Salon.com blogger Bruce Majors, David and Carola Nott of the Reason Foundation and Cathy Hart, our administrative director from the Cruise Authority, the agency that helped organize the seminar.  Cathy advised us that there were a total of 82 participants in the Reason Cruise, and all were present and accounted for, even the couple of people whose flights had been delayed and were unable to join us at the Hilton the previous night. After the welcoming reception, we all went down to enjoy our first dinner in the Grand Epernay Dining Room on Deck 3.

We sat at a table with Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum and familiarized ourselves with the menu.  Guests could select appetizers, entrees and desserts from a standard list of items on the left side of the menu, or we could choose selections on the right side, which would change every night of the week, or you could mix and match between both sides.  There seemed to be something to please everyone, so we were never disappointed with any dinner in the Grand Epernay. There were three other restaurants on the Celebrity Solstice, the Silk Harvest (Asian cuisine), Murano (Contemporary French cuisine) and the Tuscan Grille (Italian Steakhouse), but each of these high-end establishments incurred an additional cover charge.  Since the meals served in the Grand Epernay were included in our cruise fee, and were pretty impressive by themselves (e.g., lobster, filet mignon, oysters, escargot, frog legs, etc.), we didn’t see any reason to dine elsewhere. When we returned to our room that night, we were delighted to find a tray of chilled strawberries dipped in chocolate, courtesy of the Reason Foundation.

We were at sea all the next day.  Pam scheduled a massage in the AquaSpa in the morning while I attended the first day of the seminar.  Science journalist Matt Ridley discussed the research and background behind his recently published book The Rational Optimist which sparked a lively debate.  Chimpanzees have developed culture, but not trade between communities; trade between such groups is hindered by hostility and territorialism. Matt suggests this might be what doomed the Neanderthal, who eschewed a nomadic existence for an isolated, territorially defensive lifestyle, while Homo Erectus wandered far out of their region of origin, befriended and frequently mated with other tribes and consequently flourished and evolved.

This talk was followed by a panel discussion on climate change.  No surprises here.  Everyone agrees that the climate is changing, as it has been for centuries.  Whether human activities are behind this phenomenon remains an open question. What were early primates doing that might have caused the end of the last ice age?  What were medieval peasants doing in the 16th century that might have contributed to the “Little Ice Age” that lasted almost 300 years until the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century?

During a morning break, a group of us were gazing out the window at the ocean and watched a gigantic school of flying fish jump out of the water to flee from the bow of our ship.  They looked like minnows to me, but someone said they were called “skipjacks,” but don’t be deceived thinking they are tiny little fish.  They are a kind of medium-sized tuna.  I realized that we were on Deck 14, probably 150 feet or more above the waves and the fish that looked to be the size of minnows from this height were more likely at least three to four feet  in length.

In the afternoon, Ben Rast, president of the Bastiat Society, spoke on “Wealth, Freedom and the Business Intellectual,” and how the Bastiat Society works to expand the concepts of personal and economic freedom to the business community by sponsoring public events to raise awareness of these ideas to a select group of business leaders.  He says it is surprising how little most businessmen know about economics, and are content to follow the advice of consultants who may not be all that informed either.

That evening, we enjoyed our first “formal” dinner in the Grand Epernay, where all male guests were requested to wear their fanciest duds (suits or tuxedoes) and all female guests were to wear the same (evening gowns or business attire).  And of course, the photographers made the rounds of every table.

There’s no way getting around the photographers on a cruise ship.  Souvenir photos are taken of passengers almost every day, and then posted in a gallery on Deck 4 for you to purchase. These photos are also available to be viewed and purchased online from the video screens in each stateroom. They first snapped our photo as we boarded the ship the previous day, when we were at our worst, after having stood in a long line in the sweltering Florida heat for almost 3 hours, and guess which photo scrolled across the screen of our television in the stateroom to greet us the next morning?  Yeah, nothing you’d want to ever see again.  But later photos were much better, and the photographers were skilled professionals who would snap three or four different poses to give everyone a variety to choose from.  Of course, they do not offer these precious pixels in a digital form, only as prints.

I took a keen interest in the technology of the ship, and closely examined the LCD television in our room.  It seemed like a potentially cool kind of hack to insert a USB flash drive in one of the two USB ports on the side of the console and play around with the wireless keyboard in the room to see if the images could be transferred to the removable media, but every time we powered up the television, we were greeted with an Apple logo, suggesting that the entire system was a customized skin for the Apple TV interface, of which I know absolutely nothing.  I decided I’d have much more fun outdoors enjoying the vast ocean surrounding us or visiting with all the fascinating people sharing this adventure than sitting in a windowless cabin puzzling out an OS X hack.  But I did love playing with the Apple TV, and checked the live webcam on the bridge every morning to see what breathtaking sights would greet us on the mornings when we docked in an exotic new port.  This is why I didn’t particularly mind not having a window, since I could get the best view from the bridge without having to pay another $400 for the privilege.

After dinner, Amy invited us up to the Sky Lounge again for drinks, but that turned out not to be a particularly good venue, since that bar becomes Karaoke Central after 10:00 p.m., so our guest entertainer Hyperion Knight suggested we meet instead at Michael’s Club, a quiet piano bar on Deck 4.  Hyperion is a fascinating fellow, an enormously talented pianist who has long been a fan of Reason and libertarianism who specifically asked to be booked on the Celebrity Solstice for this cruise so he could participate in the Reason Seminar, as did stand-up comic James Johann.  Both James and Hyperion joined our group whenever they weren’t on stage performing in the Solstice Theater or the Celebrity Central auditorium.

The next morning, we enjoyed a lively discussion about “Sustainability,” what it means to politicians and what the dictionary says it really means.  Matt Ridley pointed out that if you take U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon’s definition of sustainability, you are presented with a dilemma. When human beings began sustaining themselves with agriculture and livestock as a hunter-gatherer culture, it required 1,500 hectares of land to “sustain” one individual throughout their short (approximately 24-30 year) lifespan.  If our current population did the same, we would require 35 entire planets of the same mass as Earth to “sustain” ourselves.  If the oceans of the world could be exploited to the same extent, we would need only 18 extra Earths to support our 21st century population.  Clearly, we’ve evolved into a much more efficient species, since our one lonely planet is able to sustain a modern population of  more than 6.7 billion people — admittedly not all equally or comfortably, but we are being “sustained” by the world we inhabit, thanks to the technologies we’ve developed.  And, he adds, the only way we’re going to be able to continue on a “sustainable” path, is to push technology further to develop more efficient food and energy production methods.  The audacious vision of Seasteading could not be more relevant to the concept of sustainability.

Gerry Ohrstrom concluded the presentation with a cleverly performed stunt he says is an old magician’s trick that he called “Bottom Up Sustainability.”

I’ve posted video of the event on YouTube at Bottom Up Sustainability.

This led thematically into a presentation by Patri Friedman and James Hogan on the concept of “Seasteading,” of which our cruise presented itself as a practical example of what can be done today, but is only the first step in what might be attempted in the near future to open a vast new frontier on our own planet, and help develop the technologies necessary to move our species even further beyond the gravity well.
I gazed out the windows of the Sky Conference Center at the flat blue horizon that surrounded our vessel, and noted that this is the same view one would see from just about any point on more than 2/3 of our planet’s surface.  Yet only a tiny fraction of the population makes their living on this frontier, most of them as employees of the companies that operate vessels such as our cruise ship.  This is an opportunity just waiting to be seized, something that the Seasteaders made clear in their presentation.

A few hours after lunch, we found ourselves pulling into our first Port of Call: San Juan, Puerto Rico.  Reason Cruisers were advised to meet on shore at 4:30 p.m. for a specially arranged tour of El Palacio de Santa Catalina, the oldest fort in the Western Hemisphere which now serves as the Governor’s Mansion.  A quick cab ride up and down narrow one-lane streets paved with bricks took us deep into Old San Juan, and La Fortaleza.  We checked in with two government officials and were led into a small waiting room where we met Francesca, our tour guide.  There were too many of us to handle in one group, so we were divided into two separate groups and another tour guide was requisitioned.
Francesca took us through a security screening far less intrusive than anything we’d previously experienced from the TSA, but still thorough enough to satisfy the cadre of security guards who followed us throughout the tour.

Veiw from La Fortaleza across the bay to the Bacardi Distillery.

Francesca explained that La Fortaleza was established as the first defensive fort on the island in 1540 when it was the territory of the Empire of Spain.  She walked us through the courtyard and explained the history of the building and how it has been expanded and maintained over the past 450 years.  In 1983, it was designated as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, which helps subsidize its maintenance and restoration.

She then took us through each of the showcase rooms of the palace:  the Blue Room where diplomats and dignitaries are welcomed, the Music Room, the Hall of Mirrors, the First Ladies Room where portraits of all the Puerto Rican First Ladies throughout the island’s history are displayed, as well as the Kennedy bedroom, which is a guest room notable for hosting President John F. Kennedy and his wife in 1961.  Even though Pope John Paul II and King Juan Carlos of Spain slept here more recently, everyone still calls it the “Kennedy Bedroom.”

In the First Ladies’ Room, there were two gigantic hand painted urns that caught my attention.  They were apparently gifts from Spain. Francesca said she always kept her distance from these, as they were probably quite fragile, as well as enormously expensive.  She then led us into the Kennedy Bedroom while the second tour group followed us.  During her narrative about that the famous bedroom, we heard a loud crash and the sickening sound of broken glass.  We all thought exactly the same thing and Amy worried that the Reason Foundation might have to make a sizable donation to UNESCO to compensate for the damage, but as it turned out, the urns were unbroken and the shattered glass was nothing more valuable than a decorative ashtray, which of course was never used since smoking is prohibited in the Palace.

The tour concluded in a private reception with Governor Luis Fortuño and many members of his cabinet.  Governor Fortuño gave us a brief state of the territory presentation and described what he and his administration had done in the past week.  Fortuño was elected governor in 2008 by the largest popular margin in 44 years, but inherited an unemployment rate of 16.7%, and a massive budget deficit that required him to persuade Wall Street banks to extend a line of credit to the island just to meet his first payroll. He immediately began working to fulfill a campaign promise to reduce the size of the government, and implemented a bold austerity plan that resulted in a $2 billion reduction in the island’s budget, privatization of much of the public works division and the elimination of as many as 17,000 civil service positions (though he suggested they probably needed to lay off up to 30,000).  On January 31, the day before our tour, he signed into law a massive new Internal Revenue Code for the island that reduced the individual tax rate by 50%, the business tax rate by 30% and eliminated the Capital Gains Tax entirely.
Like the rest of the nation, Puerto Rico has a massive inventory of unsold real estate that he hopes the new tax law will help unload.  Purchasing incentives now in place apply to all home buyers, regardless of whether the property is a first home or a rental investment, and such purchases will be exempt from income taxes for the first six years of ownership.
Since his college years, Fortuño has advocated statehood for Puerto Rico.  He pointed out that all 4 million Puerto Ricans are American citizens and are allowed to vote in primary elections, run for congress and even for the presidency, but not one Puerto Rican can cast a vote in a presidential election.  He believes his island has much to contribute to the country besides Bacardi Rum (which is distilled in a factory just across the bay from the Palacio de Santa Catalina), and deserves a voice in how the nation is run. Puerto Rico has representatives in Congress, but no senators and little influence on the rest of the country.  They survive quite well without federal funding for highways and schools, and could teach other states a thing or two about living within their means.

Terry Floyd, Gov. Luis Fortuno, Pam Davis

He was very friendly and down-to-earth, quite happy to answer even the most difficult and critical questions from our group with a thoughtful clarity that was most refreshing in comparison to other politicians I’ve met.  And believe me, the policy analysts on the Reason staff  talk to politicians in Washington regularly, and are not often satisfied with most of the answers they hear in that environment.  They grilled Fortuño on nitty-gritty details and he was remarkably non-evasive.  He deferred questions to his staff only when he couldn’t recall specific numbers from memory, but he has been immersed in working out this recovery roadmap for almost two years and had answers for most questions right at his fingertips.  His economic objectives are ambitious and perhaps a bit optimistic, but he presents himself more in the mold of a Ron Paul Republican than a Ronald Reagan Republican.

Pam spent some time discussing health policy with Annie Mayol De Burgos, the Governor’s chief Health Care Advisor, who would love to recruit bi-lingual nurses to come work in Puerto Rico, while I spoke for a short while with José Ramón Perez-Riera, the governor’s chief Economic Advisor.

It was a fascinating evening, but on the way back to the port, we discussed issues with our cab driver, and leaned that even though Fortuño enjoyed a 60% victory over his opponent in the 2008 election, he is far from popular among the common citizens.  The cabbie explained that he thought the Governor was a very bad politician.  He said there are far more homeless people begging on the streets of San Juan than before Fortuño took office, and he himself had a friend who once worked for the government, but was laid off in the first wave of staff cuts, and is now among those homeless beggars.  The cabbie said he was glad we enjoyed our visit, and he hopes we’ll return to his island someday, but he warned us that we shouldn’t be fooled by slick politicians.  They are all out for themselves, and the rest of us suffer to feed their ambition.

Naturally, this made for more stimulating dinner conversation back on board the ship, accompanied by excellent wine and another masterpiece menu designed by Executive Chef Mischa Graafmans.  Some folks chose to dine ashore at one of the many local restaurants, so our seating arrangements were adjusted to fill the tables with empty chairs. Señor Frog’s was right across the street from the port and seemed quite popular but again, we’d already paid for our Grand Epernay dinner and it was probably a notch or two classier than any place we could have afforded to eat in San Juan.

After dinner, the ship bid good-bye to Puerto Rico and cast off while we all convened once again in Michael’s Club, where Pam and I each sampled two fingers of twelve year old scotch from their selection. When we returned to our room, the Reason Foundation had delivered a bottle of Chardonnay for our enjoyment. We didn’t stay up late, though, as we had a very busy morning scheduled the next day.

We awoke at 8:00 a.m. to the beautiful sights of the Great Bay at Phillipsburg, St. Maarten.  After a quick breakfast, we made our way down the gangplank to meet a tour guide for our 3 ½ hour Lord Sheffield Tall Ship snorkel adventure.  The only Reason cruisers who joined us for this excursion were David and Laura Price, who like Pam and I, were celebrating a honeymoon as well as an anniversary.  Though they’ve been married for over two years, they could not afford a traditional honeymoon, having been laid off in the wake of the financial collapse of 2008, but now they are both gainfully employed and ready to celebrate their lives together.  We told them we were glad they chose not to wait 26 years the way we did.  Another newlywed couple were on the Lord Sheffield as well, and they were just as adorable.  The bride even had a hoodie she wore with “The New Mrs. Cornutt” embroidered on the front.

The tour guide was happy to take us to a taxi under a palm tree that whisked us less than a mile to the Dock Maarten Marina, where we boarded the ship.  The guide was pleased with the size of our group, and reported that it had been weeks since they’d been able to book a full load on the ship.  The Lord Sheffield is just as advertised, a weathered old square sail 72 foot long Tall Ship where Cap’n Jack Sparrow would feel right at home.  Arrrrr…

We climbed aboard and found seating as the skipper introduced himself and his crew.  He showed us where life jackets were kept and explained how to use the ship’s head, apparently a recent modification to the old tub.  Pam wasn’t certain she would enjoy this, but I was eager to get into the water and explore the coral reefs up close and personal.  We sailed out of the marina and past Fort Amsterdam, the oldest Dutch military fort in the Caribbean before we dropped anchor among three or four other catamarans and yachts in Cay Bay.  Stephanie and Danielle served us beer, soft drinks and delicious baguettes topped with brie and pear slices. I had a taste of Presidente, a popular Caribbean lager brewed in the Domincan Republic.

Terry just before snorkeling in Cay Bay, St. Maarten

I absolutely love snorkeling.  It is something I look forward to every time we visit Maui, and I was interested in seeing for myself how the Caribbean coral reefs might differ from those in the southern Pacific.  The water in Cay Bay was much deeper than some of the snorkeling areas in Hawaii, and we were told where to swim to find the most active sea life and interesting attractions.  It took me a while to make my way over to the reefs near the shore, but once there, I was surrounded by curious, colorful tropical fish like blue striped sergeant majors, yellow-tail snapper, brown sea urchins and unidentifiable, but apparently benign monsters. There was even a floating Tiki Bar in the middle of the bay which I could have visited, but I had too little time to waste drinking, and it was between me and a shipwreck I was curious to explore, so I swam around it.

My one hour in the 80° water was over all too soon, and after snorkeling around the carcass of a sunken tourist submarine (nothing to worry about, the thing sank in a storm decades ago and no passengers were on board at the time), I was advised by Stephanie that it was time to return to the ship.  As Pam predicted, I was the last snorkeler to climb out of the water and shed my fins.

Terry, smothered in sunscreen after Snorkeling in Cay Bay, St. Maarten

Stef and Danielle fed us barbequed chicken and ribs, served us more beer, rum and fresh fruit as Justin, our first mate, unfurled the sails so we could make our way east around the Pelican Key. Rounding the key, we asked Justin about the structure we saw on shore that we assumed was an oil refinery, but he explained that was their island’s main desalination plant.  St. Maarten does not have sufficient fresh water in its streams to sustain its current population, much less the thousands of tourists who visit each week, so most of their fresh water has to be produced through desalination.

We asked him about the other fort higher up the hill, and he said it wasn’t a real fort, but only a wealthy playboy’s mansion designed to appear like a walled fort.  He noted the tennis courts adjacent to what would otherwise have been a cannon mount, a dead giveaway.
After a while, Justin turned the ship back west and we returned to the Great Bay.  When we asked about disposing of our garbage, Stef explained where we could deposit recyclable containers and paper trash, but suggested we could throw our chicken and rib bones directly into the sea, where there were plenty of scavengers to eat them.  She even collected a bucket of bones she said we could toss overboard at the marina, where hungry terrapins were waiting for us to dock just so they could feast on our garbage.  Indeed, when we tied up at Dock Maarten’s, she threw a couple of bones overboard and a swarm of large terrapins, each at least four feet long, lunged at every bone that hit the water.  It was an amazing sight.

It was still early afternoon when the Lord Sheffield returned, so while waiting for a cab to take us back to the port, our tour guide invited us to stay in town to visit and shop on Front Street.  He said we could always take a different cab or a water taxi back to the port, or even walk the half mile around the marina if we felt like it, so I asked Pam if she’d like to tourist around a bit, but she declined and said she’d be happy to relax all afternoon with her Kindle (she was in the middle of a Terry Pratchett Discworld book, and the sailing adventure we’d just completed was about all the excitement she wanted to experience).  I kissed her good-bye and set out down the sidewalk around the boatyard to the Great Bay Beach.

It was a short stroll to Front Street, and I was wearing my amazing Vibram Five-Finger shoes, so I had no issues with walking.  Philipsburg was peppered with duty free stores offering liquor at amazing prices, mostly Cruzan rums produced in St. Croix or Bacardi from Puerto Rico, but they also carried many varieties of bourbon, vodka and gin.  I picked up a small bottle of Grande Absente, which the proprietor assured me was unavailable in the U.S., as it contains 35mg of thujone, far more than is allowed by the BATF.  I had purchased a bottle of Absente in Paris back in 2006, but found out only later that it was not genuine absinthe.  I’ve learned a bit more about this spirit in the past few years, and have tasted other brands, so I was interested in trying this variety, and you couldn’t beat the price.

One of the more unusual liquors of the Caribbean is Guavaberry Rum, the native spirit of St. Maarten.  This is rum distilled from molasses and the fermented juice of guavaberries which grow in the high rainforests of St. Maarten.  I enjoyed a taste of the product at the retail store outlet on Front Street, but like a fool, did not purchase any to bring home.  I thought it would surely be available stateside through Beverages & More or some other outlet, but alas, they have no foreign distribution arrangement and the product is only available for sale in St. Maarten, or by mail order from their website.  But the “Buy Online” link doesn’t appear to work from the U.S., so I guess that means I’ll have to return to paradise to taste it again.

As I examined the merchandise at various shops, I was approached numerous times by vendors asking if I enjoyed smoking Cuban cigars.  Since I don’t smoke tobacco, I wasn’t all that interested, but I was curious about these legendary stogies.  I noted that most of the stores kept their Cuban cigars in sealed humidity controlled rooms, and would open them only for customers who were serious about purchasing them. I later read in our Celebrity Cruise newsletter that we would not be allowed to bring Cuban cigars back into the United States, so if passengers purchased them, they would have to smoke them on a shore excursion or at one of the designated smoking areas on the ship.

St. Maarten is the Dutch half of the island, which is shared with the French half, known as Sint Martin.  But the French control far more than “half” of the island.  The 37 square mile island is supposed to be the smallest land mass in the world that is governed by two different  European nations. Legend has it that the reason the Dutch control so little territory here is that when the island was divided between the two colonies in 1648, one Frenchman and one Dutchman were selected to walk in opposite directions around the perimeter of the island and whichever one covered the greatest distance when they met again would claim that proportion of the island around which he had walked for his own country.  The Frenchman set out heading west with a wineskin to sustain him on the journey while the Dutchman walked east with only a bottle of gin.  As the story goes, the Dutchman walked at a leisurely pace, enjoyed the sunshine and frequently sipped his gin until he became intoxicated, had difficulty walking, and eventually passed out on the beach.  He was found by the Frenchman who had covered far more distance by running as often as the terrain would allow, and using the wineskin only to relieve his thirst.  This is supposedly why the French control 21 square miles of Sint Martin, while the Dutch only control 16 square miles of St. Maarten.

I did more sightseeing around the beach and was enticed by a lovely young lady into buying a $2 bottle of Carib, a dark amber beer brewed in Trinidad and Tobago. I sat under an umbrella, listened to music from a steel drum band and enjoyed the beverage before I decided to head back to the ship.  I stopped in a small souvenir shop I’d visited earlier to pick up a fancy island shirt that had caught my eye, a hat and a pair of sunglasses.  I’d been comparison shopping among all the various tourist traps and found this one to have the lowest prices. This was right next to the dock where a water taxi could whisk me back to the port, but I was refreshed and rested and wasn’t yet ready to say good-bye to the beach.  I was very quickly falling in love with this place.

I took my time walking back to port and then surveyed the other ships anchored in the harbor.  A Carnival Cruise ship was docked next to our Celebrity Solstice while the Royal Caribbean Oasis of the Seas had a dock all to itself.  The Oasis of the Seas is one of the two largest cruise ships ever built, and has only been in service for the last 18 months.  It can carry a total of 6, 600 passengers, as compared to the 2,839 passengers on the Solstice.  It was gigantic, and a marvel to behold.

There were also a dozen or more luxury yachts sharing the harbor, the largest and most opulent of them owned by Steven Spielberg, according to Stephanie of the Lord Sheffield, and the locals would greatly appreciate it if he would move it somewhere else, as they are tired of looking at it.

Spielberg's Yacht in St. Maarten

It has apparently been taking up a berth at St. Maarten for over a year.

I was back on the ship before I noticed how tired I was.  I still felt invigorated by the adventures of the day, but it was all beginning to catch up with me, so I retired to our stateroom to take a nap.  The only Reason seminar events going on in the afternoon were screenings of Reason.tv videos, and since I subscribe to the channel on iTunes, I figured I’d probably already seen the segments they were showing.

During dinner that evening, Cruise Director Joe Carey announced that they were seeing more guests reporting gastrointestinal illness in the ship’s infirmary, and he reiterated that the crew would be continuing their enhanced disinfection procedures encouraging all passengers to observe meticulous handwashing practices to reduce the risk of illness.  Amy mentioned that Ben Rast had been quarantined in his stateroom as had David Nott’s children.  I was glad to be spending so much of my time with an experienced nurse, who could keep me informed of how to stay healthy.

The next day, we awoke to a beautiful view of the Long Bay adjacent to the city of Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands.  The shore excursion we booked for this day departed a few hours later than yesterday’s snorkel adventure, so we were able to sleep in a little longer, and catch up on the news of the massive demonstrations in Cairo.  The unrest in Egypt had been a topic of discussion among our group, but with such limited internet access on the ship, no one felt fully informed about the situation when our only news sources were CNN, MSNBC and Fox News on the satellite feed.  The folks we were hanging with had much more confidence in the veracity of blog posts from eyewitnesses than the sanitized and censored news reports from major media outlets, particularly after Mubarak attempted to shut down internet access to the country and forbid television journalists from reporting on the crisis.

We disembarked from the ship at 10:30 a.m. and had our photo taken once again.  I had hoped to have the Solstice in the background instead of the Havensight shopping mall next to the port, but the photographer framed the shot in such a way that I thought it was one of the best photos of our journey, so we decided it was a keeper.  By the time we returned to the ship that evening, we both had matching island shirts that we wore to dinner.

We climbed aboard an open-air taxi with about a dozen other tourists to travel to the northeast side of St. Thomas and marvel at the Coral World Ocean Park.  Before we departed, our driver advised us not to freak out about her driving habits.  St. Thomas, she explained, had been a Danish colony until the U.S. purchased the three U.S. Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917 (St. John and St. Croix are the other two), in an attempt to protect the newly-completed Panama canal from attacks by German U-Boats in World War I. Just as in the U.K. and much of Europe, drivers in St. Thomas always keep to the left side of the road, making the Virgin Islands the only U.S. territory where this practice is common.
This made our drive over the hills to Coki Point a bit more interesting.  I noted an abundance of churches of all kinds every few blocks along the road, which reminded me of the deeply religious Midwest where I grew up.  I assume this is a legacy of the ongoing missionary effort to convert the natives to Christianity, something I did not see in St. Maarten or Puerto Rico.  Puerto Rico seemed to be almost exclusively Catholic, but St. Thomas appeared to be littered with churches run by Baptists, Presbyterians, 7th Day Adventists, Latter Day Saints and several other denominations.  Even our bus had a “Jesus is Lord” sticker plastered on its rear window.

Away from the Havensight Shopping Mall with its Rolex, Cartier, Bulova, Gucci and Hooters outlets, poverty was my primary impression of the island after we climbed over the hills out of sight of the port.  Empty stores, dilapidated homes and graffiti dominated the landscape here, which was otherwise a sun-drenched paradise.  Parts of the road were washed out and our driver had to stop periodically to allow other traffic to pass when the road narrowed down to a single lane.  Happy children clothed in rags played along the beaches as we passed, waving in welcome at us. I thought how sad it was that once again, just as in the mid-west and elsewhere, poverty seems to follow in direct proportion to the establishment of more religious institutions in a region.

Oddly enough, Pam’s impression of St. Maarten was one of poverty and neglect, but she did not spend as much time in the downtown area the way I did.  My impression of St. Maarten was one of opulence and wealth, thanks to the presence of Mr. Spielberg’s yacht in the harbor and all the mansions built on the hillsides and along the beaches.  Perhaps because we didn’t visit the rural areas of either Puerto Rico or St. Maarten, we didn’t see as much of the “real” islands. St. Thomas struck me as a beautiful, but neglected paradise, painted over with religious murals imploring the populace to accept Jesus for their salvation.

We arrived at Coral World and were welcomed warmly by the staff, who told us we had at least an hour to explore the park before our scheduled semi-submersible tour of the coral reefs in Coki Bay.  We took advantage of the time to visit the “petting zoo” where we could touch sea cucumbers and pick up sea stars and conches from a shallow artificial tide pool while  a marine naturalist described their characteristics.  Mindful of our enhanced hygiene practices, Pam suggested we thoroughly wash our hands after visiting this attraction, to avoid contamination with pseudomonas, a common bacteria in tidepool sea life, and the reason why you always want your seafood thoroughly cooked.

After our handwashing routine, we visited the Sea Lion exhibition, where we found ourselves up close and personal with a gigantic, but friendly Sea Lion.   We see these creatures regularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, but are very rarely within arm’s reach of them.  We then explored the aquarium exhibits before heading out to see the underwater observatory.  This is a remarkable domed structure whose base descends at least 40 feet below the surface, around which Sea Trek underwater helmet divers stroll in a wonderland of shipwrecks and sea life. I’ve uploaded a group of videos taken here on my YouTube channel.

Coral World belongs to the Island Iguanas as much as it does to the sea lions, sea turtles, and sharks who share this home, but only the Iguanas are given full run of the area. Signs warn visitors not to feed these fellows, as they are wild residents of the island and feed themselves quite easily with a healthy diet of fruit, leaves and flowers. And they go wherever they damned well please, because we are the guests in their home, not the other way around. They are all over the place, leisurely crawling under your table at one of the two food vending booths and strolling around the shark tank.  Like cats, they pretty much ignore humans as if we were irrelevant, which I suppose we are in this environment.

We met up with our tour guide for the Nautilus Semi-submersible journey at the park’s gate and she walked us down the road to the dock where our boat awaited us.  On the way, we passed more iguanas and a giant Heron standing on a rock just offshore.  The photo posted here cannot really convey the size of this magnificent bird, whose long neck stood up at least five feet or more above his rocky pedestal.

The Nautilus has a deep, weighted keel so it sails very low in the water, allowing passengers to see the ocean floor through large, clear windows facing outward from the lower level like the proverbial glass-bottomed boat.  It reminded me very much of the submarine tour we enjoyed off the coast of Maui some years ago, but that craft went much deeper than the Nautilus, which moved in a slow circle around the reef.  A scuba diver joined us halfway around the cove and attracted schools of fish to circle our vessel by squeezing out cat food from a plastic tube.  Not surprisingly, fish enjoy the same kind of cuisine as cats (Meow Mix), because, well, fish usually eat other fish, and there’s nothing a housecat loves more than seafood.
We watched as baby sharks swam casually around their temporary home at Coral World. Female sharks give birth in shallow waters where there are fewer predators to disturb them, and almost immediately depart, leaving the defenseless pups behind to fend for themselves. The strongest ones survive of course, but their numbers are dwindling, so Coral World routinely rescues pups to raise them to maturity in a safe environment with abundant food in the tank to help them learn survival skills. Upon maturity, the sharks are released back into the wild far enough away from the snorkel and scuba attractions as to be no danger to the guests, but in deep enough water to find their own prey without much difficulty.

My iguana friend had no hesitation to rest on the edge of the tank with the tip of his tail submerged an inch or two into the water, perhaps just to tease the sharks. Caribbean Iguanas are awesomely bad-ass reptiles, more impressive than I ever imagined.

Coral World was one of the truly astonishing attractions on our trip and Pam had to drag me away from the shark tank to catch the taxi back to the port. I took as many photos and videos as I could to capture these memories, including much of the Nautilus coral reef tour, and have uploaded them to my YouTube channel.

When we returned to the port, Pam and I did some last minute gift shopping at the Havensight mall before exhaustion overcame us and we took a refreshing shower in our stateroom.  Later, we sat outside on the deck as the Solstice pulled out of port and we bid good-bye to St. Thomas.

Patri Friedman missed dinner that evening, as he was feeling ill, as several others had periodically during the cruise, but he didn’t feel quite sick enough to be treated in the infirmary.  He just spent some quality time outside on deck to take in fresh ocean air, and later that night was feeling well enough to join us in Michael’s Club around 11:00 p.m.

Patri Friedman and Matt Welch

Ben Rast had also recovered and joined us for dinner with his lovely wife Peggy.  Peggy is also a nurse, and like Pam, managed to avoid getting sick herself by following many of the same precautions we employed.  While completely unrelated to influenza, the norovirus is commonly called “24 hour flu” because its symptoms typically resolve in that timeframe, as Ben’s experience suggests.

But norovirus wasn’t the only medical problem that plagued our group that night.  Josh Hall’s wife Sandy was stuck in the infirmary herself, having been stung by a jellyfish during their snorkeling adventure that afternoon.  Josh said the whole tour swam through a group of jellyfish and Sandy wasn’t the only one to be stung, but she certainly suffered the worst of it.  He said the water was crystal clear, but so were the jellyfish, who were all but invisible to most of the snorkeling tourists.  The only way you would have known you’d touched them at all was the pain from their poisonous sting.

Josh and Sandy were a delightful couple from Pennsylvania, and easily identified because they had a tradition of wearing matching shirts to all our functions. But the one night when Pam and I adopted their custom and wore our own matching island shirts was of course the night Sandy couldn’t join us for dinner.

The next day was spent entirely at sea on our way back to Florida.  The morning sessions of the Reason seminar focused on globalization and the influence of Bollywood culture in the Muslim world and its wider influence in the west.  Shikha Dalmia presented a fascinating talk about how these insipid and utterly predictable musicals have been on the forefront of cultural evolution not only in India but all over Asia, as they frequently depict forbidden romance between individuals of vastly different cultures, religions, races and social castes, but unlike the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, these stories always have happy endings, and suggest that amidst all the violence of the world, love really can conquer any obstacle.

In the afternoon, Seasteading again took center stage as Max Marty outlined a number of business cases where entrepreneurial startups established on ships and platforms operating outside of national borders would have a much better chance of success free of government restrictions and red tape than if similar ventures were attempted on shore.  He pointed out how almost all cruise ships feature gambling casinos as standard attractions, but are prohibited from operating when the ships are in port, yet are open 24 hours a day when at sea.  As he pointed out, while marine research and ecological preservation are important to this concept, if the project is to succeed at all, “The Business of Seasteading will have to be Business.”  Max has now launched his own startup, BlueSeed, that is making headlines in Silicon Valley.

Dario Mutabdzija, the Seasteading Institute’s Director of Legal Strategy, then outlined the legal landscape of the oceans and how maritime law might help or hinder such endeavors.  As a conscientious attorney, he also came clean and confessed to being the culprit who broke the ashtray in the First Ladies Room at El Palacio de Santa Catalina in Puerto Rico.  “I was trying to take photographs of the artwork, since I was so enchanted by all the portraits of these incredibly beautiful women,” he said. “I don’t want anyone to blame the children for the accident.  It was all my fault. I was just backing up to frame my shot, when I knocked over the plate.  I didn’t even know it was there until it fell!”
He went on to explain where seasteads will need to be located to conform to existing law.  Legally, a seastead might be located as close as 25 miles away from a coastline or as far as 200 miles off shore.  International treaty establishes a territorial zone that extends 12 miles from a coast; then there is a contiguous zone that extends another 12 miles beyond that, and finally, there is what is known as an “exclusive economic zone” that extends as far as 200 miles further.  But the EE zone is just an invention of the United States, and is largely unrecognized by other countries, so it is not likely we will be able to establish seasteads anywhere near the U.S.  This is complicated by ongoing legal arguments over the two main laws governing maritime matters.  The United Nations Conventional Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is a binding treaty signed by most members of the U.N., but not by the United States.  The U.S. is instead arguing in favor of its own recipe for disaster that is called “The Law of the Sea Treaty” (appropriately abbreviated as LOST).  If seasteading is to ever succeed, LOST must never be ratified, because it would kill the idea before it ever gets off the ground (or off the shore).  Fortunately, LOST has very few friends in the U.N., which only recognizes UNCLOS as the established standard under which we should operate.  But as the recent Wikileaks diplomatic disclosures have demonstrated, the U.S. is not above using bribery and blackmail to force its will on the rest of the world, so it might be to our benefit that the yanks’ political muscle is rapidly being atrophied by modern technology.

Later in the evening the Reason Seminar screened two recent documentary films in which TSI is prominently featured.  One, The Sea is a Harsh Mistress is all about TSI and its work and includes great footage from the first Ephemerisle in 2009 which I wrote about here in APA-50.  The second film, How to Start Your Own Country was inspired by longtime SF fan Erwin Strauss (aka “Filthy Pierre) and his pioneering book of the same name that details the history of people who decided to do just that and the consequences of such a decision.  It is at times funny, sometimes inspiring, and altogether fascinating.  Did you know that Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, rules over his own sovereign island between Connecticut and New York?

During the screening, James Hogan handed me an invitation to a private tour of the Celebrity Solstice bridge to be conducted on Saturday morning. This was not on our regular itinerary, and he explained that the size of the group would be restricted, so the tour would be offered first to members of TSI and opened to other cruisers only if there was enough room to accommodate them.  I was honored to be asked and was thrilled to let Pam know that we were in for a Saturday morning treat.

The next day after breakfast, we all met in the elevator lobby of Deck 7 where we were to meet our guide.  A Solstice crewmember named Cherry met us outside the elevators and checked our passports before issuing all of us bright red stickers to help identify tour members.  She said we could take all the photographs we wished, but she requested that we not shoot close-ups of the instrumentation.  She then led us around the elevator lobby and through a door marked “Crew Only.”

The corridors beyond this door were not decorated with the wood paneled elegance of the rest of the ship, but were painted a flat, utilitarian white.  We continued forward until another door opened and we emerged into the bright sunshine of the expansive Solstice bridge that stretches all the way across the bow of the ship.

The first mate introduced himself and offered to answer any questions we might have about the ship’s operation and policies.  The seasteaders, of course, had lots of detailed technical questions about the Solstice class of ships as well as the industry itself.  The officer was courteous and well-spoken and when asked about his own background, told us he had always worked in the cruise industry from the time he graduated high school in Greece to the present.  He was now 36 years old and he expects to continue his career and hopes eventually to be promoted to captain.  He explained how the ship’s stabilizers work, how many diesel engines were necessary to operate the vessel, and how most of our fresh water is obtained via an on board desalination unit.

Each day of our voyage, at precisely noon, the Captain of the Celebrity Solstice, Yannis Berdos, addressed the crew and passengers over the PA system, to announce our precise location, direction and speed of travel, current weather conditions and finally to wish us a pleasant voyage.  He had a thick Greek accent, but was pleasant and approachable.  His biography indicates he has lived at sea most of his life, as crew and later captain of tanker ships before joining Celebrity Cruises in1994 and has since then been in charge of all three classes of ships in the Celebrity fleet.  It was an honor to meet Captain Berdos and learn about this amazing maritime business.

Capt. Berdos, Pam Davis, Terry Floyd

Pam noted that none of the crew would shake hands with anyone, maintaining their strict infection control practices, and most of them wore gloves whenever they interacted with passengers.  It is to their credit that in the Center for Disease Controls’ published report of the outbreak on our cruise, only 10 of 1,227 crew members reported illness, while 118 of the 2,839 passengers became ill.  While norovirus was the suspected causative agent of the outbreak, the CDC’s inspection did not identify the specific virus; only the most common symptoms reported by passengers suggest norovirus as the cause of the trouble.  Our staterooms were cleaned at least twice a day and each time we returned, we could smell the bleach that had been used to disinfect every inch of the place.  Maintenance staff were constantly wiping down the handrails of all stairways and inside each elevator to try to contain the virus, and for the most part, it did not cause us any real discomfort.

The bridge tour was an unexpected delight, and I learned a great deal about life on the luxurious floating city that is a cruise ship.  This was my second cruise ship vacation and Pam’s first, but you can be sure it won’t be our last.

Later that day, we posed with as many of our Reason Seminar participants as could fit on a staircase for yet another photograph, but one that was definitely worth purchasing.