Better Map

Slightly better map of our route.

San Antonio, Texas

This city was a big surprise. From our book, it looked interesting but we were expecting a little town with old buildings, kind of like a scene from a western I guess =].  To our surprise we saw some high-rises and a bustling city.  When we walked into the heart of it, we discovered an area that hugs the San Antonio river.  You walk down some stairs and find yourself surrounded by tons of food joints, people, music and a beautiful setting on the water.  We were just blown away by how cool it was.

We walked around and checked the place out a bit.  We wound up going into this bar/restaurant called Dicks.  It looked like a normal place and we wanted to grab a beer and some finger food.  Little did we know, we were about to have the bar experience of our lives.

As soon as you walk in, you cant help but notice that the floor is covered with paper and napkins.  People are wearing hats made of white paper with hilarous things on them.  People are having friendly paper fights through the whole place.  Just an amazing scene as you walk in.

The waitresses come around and make you your own personal hat with something that makes fun of you.  One guy had a hat that read “I voted for McCain”, a girl had one that said”Goes down faster than an elevator”.  You get the point.

We ordered ourselves a small rack of ribs and some wings. And 24 oz beers.  We soon got our personal hats – mine read “The best 2 inches you’ll ever have” and Euge had one that said “Beats it more than Michael Jackson” haha.

We had an amazing time there and when all was done, I had finished three 24oz coronas and euge had finished two 24oz of some other beer.  And the guy next to us bought us shots of Patron. Yep we were nice and wobbly haha.

We stumbled to our car and spent the night in the heart of the city.  The next morning we’re going to explore the city some more.

Houston, We have some Russians

The visitor center at the entrance to Texas was really cool.  There was a walkway over a marshland and we got to see turtles, birds, snakes, toads and crabs hunting for fish.  Very cool.

We arrived at NASA Mission Control in Houston, Texas after an early morning drive from our campsite. This is the only thing we only wanted to do in Houston.

At first the museum was more like children’s arcade or something, with little kids running around and interactive exhibits geared toward them were everywhere. Even the map was childish. Nevertheless, we quickly found the cockpit of the space shuttle and got to look around inside. Very cool – you can see what the pilots see when they land and all of the instrumentation.

Then we go in line to go for a tour of the actual mission control room NASA uses for current space missions.  The wait was long and tedious but we were finally seated in the tram that took us on a tour of the NASA buildings.  On the outside they were nothing impressive at all, but we passed a building were they do all the design work for the future rockets, the historical control room used from 1960s until 1995 and the astronaut training facility.  We arrived at the control room and we were seated in a little auditorium right above it.  There was a very informative lecture about it, mentioning that NASA is switching back to a capsule design, has goals to get back to the moon, and eventually to Mars.

Our next stop on the tour was rocket park.  There were two rockets outside which were cool but the real surprise was in the nondescript building next to it.  The rockets inside were like nothing I’ve ever see.  They were so tremendous it was mind boggling.  We walked around, snapped some photos and set off to San Antonio after a quick refueling mission at McDonalds.

The only actual photo of Houston itself: