The Omni Hotel is a cracker - large airy and beautifully landscaped with ponds inside and out, and huge colourful Koi carp along with other fish. The service is great and the prices even better.
Here is a shot of all the carp who come up to great us as we stand on the side of the pools.
Houston skyline is not that impressive from a distance but it is so hard to tell with everything being so flat here. We will need to explore more. We decide to spend half a day at the Space Centre - thats what Houston is famous for, right? By the time we drive south through the very busy freeways, it is nearly early afternoon, and I am not feeling so hot with the allergies I started with, turning into a hacking cough and miserably congested head.
The freeways are more tangled than anywhere I have seen in the US, with freeways running parallel to each other often. A real traffic nightmare. Tom is a great driver, fast but competent on the freeways so we manoeuvre our way through the traffic bit by bit.
We make our way to the space centre and know we are there when we see these jets at the entrance.
The first thing to impress is the shuttle "on the back" of the huge Boeing 747.
How the hell do these things fly together? Inside the jet, details of how the plan to transport the shuttle evolved thanks to some clever dickie engineer whose name I forgot to take down - but he was obviously brilliant and thought outside the square. Here's a bit more information on it. It is very impressive. The space centre is well worth a visit, lots of explanations and you realise just how pioneering this work has been, and how brave (or crazy) the astronauts must be. The rockets are immense and the areas that the men and women occupy so small, that is it mind blowing.
The engines that push the rockets up are immense!
We spent about 5 hours there and could have done a lot more but my health was not good and I needed to get to a chemist. Managed that and also managed a trip to the Apple store in Houston to buy a laptop for Hunter, who has saved for nearly a year to get this, and an Apple watch for my birthday. Very happy but tired and need a rest.
