Hitting up Houston

"Guest" post by Z!

Poor Hannies is sick today from playing with the chickens (our niece and nephews living in Austin) so I'm taking over the blog post! We'll see if she feels like interjecting commentary later, but honestly since everything will have been already covered in such brilliant detail I don't know what she'll say.

Saturday is the best day for us on this trip because I don't have to work! Usually I work normal hours on our trip - I've got a little 4g to wifi hotspot in the car so I sit on my laptop during travel days or spend the majority of the day inside when we're staying with friends/in a hotel. So today we went out to hit up the town!.. at noon. We woke up feeling super sluggish thanks to our night of delicious bbq, so we ran a mile around this little neighborhood lake (before our lungs filled with water from the humidity and we gave up) and did a backyard workout to burn off a minute portion of our dinner.

When we finally made it out the door we headed down to Space Center Houston, which is NASA's official visitor center.

We hopped on a tram tour that took us over to see a few sights at the legit NASA complex. First thing we saw was the astronaut training center, which had all the space station modules that they use for practice and to get ready for their actual trip up to the international space station. They had some cool rigs to simulate low and micro-gravity (apparently zero-gravity is old fashioned and technically untrue? cause they call it micro-gravity now), big simulators to help them practice docking, and some lunar rovers to cruise around in.

Space center modules





Lunar rovers




Second and last stop was "rocket park", where they had a few older and smaller rockets, but they also built a huge warehouse to protect the Saturn V rocket that carried alllll of the Apollo moon missions. It was dang huge.

 

Learned several things I never knew, like that all the Apollo missions used this same rocket type to get them into orbit, and that there were 17 total Apollo moon missions and 6 landed on the moon (Hannah always thought that Apollo 11 was the only group to land on the moon, how EMBARASSING). Amazing to see what it took to get mankind to the moon, and that people were willing to strap themselves to this thing and light it on fire!

After the tram tour we went to check out the Space Shuttle Program exhibit, which was the historic Boeing 747 and the space shuttle Independence that it carried. For some reason I never realized that these shuttles never went to the moon (which should have been obvious) and that all these missions came after we had already gone to the moon and apparently decided... it wasn't worth going back? DID WE EVEN GO IN THE FIRST PLACE?? Who knows.

All in all it was a pretty cool place.




I was starving after all this walking, so we decided to get one last good barbecue meal before leaving Texas. We headed over to a place called The Pit Room, which was money $$$. Love me some barbecue, even if everyone in Texas weighs 300 pounds because of it!






Final stop of the night was at Hermann Park in downtown Houston to see the Sam Houston Monument. The park was pretty cool but very crowded, but had a neat outdoor theater and mini train that looped around the park. I liked the monument, it's kind of crazy to think about these men in history that have such huge cities named after them. Still know 0 about the guy besides he lived with Native Americans and led the Texas armies.









What a guy.




It was a long day. Went back to my aunt and uncle's place and got some milkshakes before calling it a night. I'm amazed that this is only day 8 of 45.... how are we even going to make it??




P.S. Try not to be disappointed when I don't write tomorrow's blog post, but you'll be back in the capable and weirdly formal writing of Hannah :)