Hello Houston

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a die-hard space fanatic. Over the years I’ve been privileged enough to visit the Kennedy Space Center, Russia’s Star City, attend the unveiling of Virgin Galactic’s Spaceship One, and witness a space shuttle launch. It'll therefore come as no surprise to learn that Garry and I have also visited the Johnson Manned Space Center in Houston, Texas.

The centre was purpose-built for the Apollo space program in a new suburb on the southern fringe of Houston. Decades later it’s still the hub of NASA’s manned space program. Currently, it's home to the nation’s astronaut corps, the International Space Station's operations, and the Orion program tasked with sending astronauts back to the moon.

In February 2005, Garry and I spent two days in the Houston area soaking up the best of NASA while sampling a few of the region’s other tourist attractions. We flew into Houston shortly after 11:00am, collected our rental car, and made our way south. Our first stop for the day was Galveston, an historic city built on a coastal barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico.

The city’s natural harbour, Galveston Bay, is the heart of the Texan offshore oil drilling industry. In the harbour you'll find all manner of hardcore infrastructure including massive oil rigs, refineries, and industrial ships. However, Galveston is probably better known for a devasting hurricane that struck the city on 8 September 1900. The storm flattened the city and killed an estimated 8,000 people. This tragic event still holds the record as the USA’s most deadly natural disaster.

Garry and drove out to the city’s eastern limits to explore the 16-kilometre-long, 5.2-metre-high, seawall that was built to protect it from future floods and hurricane storm surges. The entire island and the nearby mainland are incredibly flat - and remain so for miles inland. It’s easy to see how these low-lying areas could become inundated by surging water.

While in Galveston we also visited the Ocean Star Offshore Drilling Rig and Museum. This fascinating decommissioned structure lets to explore the workings of an offshore rig. A series of models and interactive displays explain how oil is found, exploited, and brought ashore. All in all, it was an excellent experience.

The following morning, we made our way to the Johnson Space Center (JSC) for a full day of NASA nerdiness. The centre offers a series of guided tram tours through the actual working complex. Visitors can choose from three itineraries. We booked two of them. 

The first tour took us into the centre’s historic Mission Control Center (where the Apollo program was once controlled) while the second took us into JSC's astronaut training facility (formerly called the Jake Gam Mission Simulator and Training Facility until the Shuttle program ended. Jake Gam was a senator who flew in space on the Shuttle in 1985).

Our visit to the Astronaut Training Facility was a real highlight. Here we watched real astronauts training for future shuttle missions. Visitors are herded into a gantry-level room with a bank of windows that look across an enormous facility filled with all manner of life-size mock-ups of the shuttle and International Space Station. Garry and I totally geeked out with everything that was on display.

The Space Center Houston's exhibition hall was equally impressive. Here we saw some of the USA’s most iconic manned space hardware on display. including the Skylab 1-G trainer, Gordon Cooper's Freedom 7 Mercury capsule, and the Apollo 17 command module. In a cheeky geek moment, I quietly reached around the Apollo module’s Perspex barrier and briefly touched its charred surface.  I was also captivated by an enormous 1:100 scale model of the International Space Station suspended from the ceiling.

Sadly, we didn’t get to see the JSC's Saturn V moon rocket. A scheduling clash with the daily tram tours forced us to choose between the training facility tour we ultimately booked and a stop at the rocket park. I consoled myself with the fact that I’d already seen a Saturn V in Florida at the Kennedy Space Centre, and again at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville.

Our final hours in Houston were spent visiting the Kemah Boardwalk. This is a lively seafront venue filled with amusements and restaurants. We booked ourselves in for dinner at Aquarium, a large surf and turf restaurant whose walls are taken up by a huge fish tank filled with tropical sea creatures. The tank also featured a rather intimidating reef shark.

We then headed back to the airport for a late-night flight back to Dallas. We then caught flights the following morning back to Sydney via LA. However, our departure from the USA wasn’t all smooth sailing. As we checked in we were unexpectedly asked to pay additional charges. After a heated argument across the counter, we cough up more money before our boarding passes were finally issued. 

We later learned that our travel agent had processed a series of airline fees incorrectly on our tickets. However, we’re still at a loss to explain why this error wasn't picked up until we checked in for our final flight home. Even more so considering we'd already flown five flights in the preceding two weeks.

Doing Dallas

Here’s another retrospective post about our time in Dallas and Houston in February 2005. At the time I was conducting a sales roadshow around the USA spruiking the virtues of my company's Asia Pacific network. Garry and I tacked a quick three-day holiday in Texas on the back of the trip before returning to Sydney.

After spending a weekend in Chicago, I flew across the country to Portland for a day of meetings while Garry headed to Texas. He had 36 hours to himself in Dallas before I arrived on a red-eye flight the following morning. My flight from Portland departed at 23:55pm. It was an all too brief 3.5-hour flight. However, thanks to the magic of time zones, I landed shortly after 5:30am. Not a red-eye route I’d recommend for anyone!

 

Our first day together in Dallas was spent exploring the Downtown area. This naturally included a visit to the infamous Sixth Floor Museum on the edge of Daley Plaza. This museum, housed in the former Texas Schoolbook Depository building (now the Dallas County Administration Building), commemorates the Kennedy assassination. 

Inside we saw the window from which those deadly bullets were fired and learned more about the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. It is undeniably chilling to look down at the streets below and imagine the mayhem the shooter must have witnessed that day.  

The plaza itself appears frozen in time. A small park beside Houston Street's triple underpass remains unchanged since that fateful day. The grassy knoll is still there and the parklands look exactly as they did in the infamous Zapruder home movie. A small painted cross on the road marks where the first bullet struck the president. Naturally, we explored the grassy knoll, noted its elevated vantage point, and debated the existence of a fabled second shooter.

Interestingly, before the tragic events of 1963, Daley Plaza's primary drawcard was its pioneer history. In the nearby Founders Park, opposite an austere memorial to JFK, there's a plaque commemorating the city's first settlers. A simple log cabin in the midst of the park recalls those early days. While researching this post I learned that the cabin is a restored replica of John Neely Bryan's home. It's reputed to be the first house built in Dallas.

Once we’d had our fill of bloody American history, we made our way over to Pioneer Plaza. I’ve briefly posted about this urban park before. It holds the world's largest bronze sculpture, a monument to the cattle drives that depicts forty bronze longhorn steers under the guidance of three cowboys. We stopped to take an obligatory tourist photo of me rodeo riding one of these enormous steers.

At this point, it became clear that there wasn’t much more to see in the Downtown area beyond the typical street market district or a local art gallery. At the behest of our Lonely Planet guide, we decided to finish the day by taking a train to nearby Fort Worth for dinner.  This gave us one final Downtown highlight.  As the train pulled away from the station, we were delighted by a fleeting final look at Daley Plaza's sloping lawn and gracefully curving roadway.

The Lonely Planet promised Garry a meat feast in true Texan style at Riscky's, a local BBQ institution. Needless to say, we soon found ourselves dining on an enormous platter of ribs, and other carnivorous delights. Garry was suitably impressed as you can see in the images above.

The following morning, we flew to Houston to visit the Johnson Space Center. We booked our flights with Southwest Airlines. At the time it was, and still is, the USA’s largest budget airline. While neither of us is a budget airline fan, we were curious to experience this iconic budget airline. 

Southwest was surprisingly good. From start to finish, the airline staff was always efficient, friendly, and proactive. For example, upon arriving at the airport we discovered that our flight had been canceled. However, the airline has flights scheduled every 30 minutes between Dallas and Houston. As a result, we were transferred onto a later flight without a moment's hesitation. 

Follow this link to learn more about our adventures in Houston.

Windy City weekend

In February 2005, Garry and I enjoyed a whirlwind weekend stopover in Chicago. To date, it remains our first and only visit to the Windy City. At the time, I was conducting a sales roadshow around the USA spruiking the virtues of my company's Asia Pacific network. Over the course of a week, I attended a whirlwind of meetings in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland. Garry kindly joined me for the ride.

As luck would have it, my hectic travel schedule was bisected by a weekend. Garry and I took advantage of this and arranged an itinerary that included a weekend in Chicago. In the end, our flight from Los Angeles landed shortly before 3:00pm on Saturday, giving us 1.5 days to explore the city before my next sales meeting.

We made the most of our brief stopover. After checking into our hotel downtown (Sheraton Grand) we made our way to the Sears Tower (now known as the Willis Tower). For more than 25 years this was the tallest building in the world. Regular readers of this blog know I'm a die-hard skyscraper fanatic. Therefore, I couldn't pass up an opportunity to check out the view from its observation deck on the 103rd floor. At 412 metres above ground level, it’s still the highest observation deck in the United States.

We reached the Sears Tower observation deck shortly before dusk. This meant we got to see Chicago by day, and by night. It was an awe-inspiring experience watching the city light up as night fell. Without a doubt, Chicago is a mind-bogglingly huge metropolis.

Once we'd had our fill of city lights, we made our way to the shores of Lake Michigan to spend the evening soaking in the sights and sounds of Navy Pier.  This pier stretches more than 1000 metres into the lake and is home to an array of shops, cultural venues, an amusement park, and other popular attractions. The most iconic of these is probably the Ferris Wheel. However the queue to ride it was too long for our liking so we gave it a miss. 

Sunday morning dawned cold and cloudy. We woke to the sight of snow falling, with light drifts accumulating on the ground. We quietly congratulated ourselves for visiting Sears Tower and Navy Pier the previous day as low cloud was shrouding the tower and the pier had undoubtedly become a rather bleak and depressing destination.

We made the most of the cold weather by venturing indoors to explore two of Chicago's preeminent museums. We kicked off with a visit to The Field Museum of Natural History, followed by the Museum of Science and Industry. We spent half a day in each venue exploring their star attractions including Sue, a famous Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton, the Apollo 8 command module, and the record-breaking Spirit of America jet-propelled car. This car broke the land speed record twice, reaching a top speed of more than 800 km/h.

However, the most impressive attraction we encountered was, without a doubt, Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds at the Museum of Science and Industry. This is a traveling exposition of dissected human bodies, animals, and other anatomical structures of the body preserved through von Hagen's patented process of plastination. We both agreed we'd never seen an exhibition quite like it before.

The following morning, I rose early and made a quick dash across downtown to visit the John Hancock Building before heading out for my first meeting. This angular black steel building is probably Chicago's most recognisable skyscraper. 

However, unlike the Sears Tower, it’s located close to the lakeshore. As a result, its 94th-floor observation deck offers some stunning views of the lake and its urban shoreline. Garry wasn’t the least bit tempted and chose to stay in bed.

One of the more interesting sights visible from the Hancock Building is the Historic Water Tower, a rather phallic 19th-century Gothic limestone landmark. I mistook it for the city's memorial to the Great Chicago Fire. According to Wikipedia, this destructive conflagration, burned from October 8–10, 1871. It killed approximately 300 people, destroyed roughly 3.3 square miles (9 km2) of the city including over 17,000 structures, and left more than 100,000 residents homeless. 

One of the more unusual sights in Chicago has to be a series of fragments from famous structures embedded in the walls of the Chicago Tribune newspaper's headquarters. Almost 150 fragments are on display including a chunk from the Great Wall of China, the Great Pyramid of Cheops, and the Berlin Wall.

Finally, a quick shoutout for Cloud Gate, Chicago's shiny kidney bean-shaped sculpture in the heart of downtown. This 40-metre-long elliptical sculpture is clad in highly polished stainless steel plates that reflect Chicago’s famous skyline and the clouds above. You can see an image published online of Cloud Gate below.

Garry had spotted it earlier in the day while I was attending my business meeting.  He'd stumbled across it while wandering through Millenium Park. I got to see it briefly from our taxi as we headed for the airport. In front of the sculpture, as we waited at a red light, we watched ice skaters carving up the ice on a temporary rink. The entire scene was reminiscent of New York's renowned Rockefeller Plaza.

Cloud Gate wasn't the only quirky work of art we encountered in Chicago. I can't end this post without mentioning a sculpture, called "Short Cut", on display outside the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Arts (MCA). Created by two Scandinavian artists, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, it depicts a white Fiat car and caravan bursting out of the surrounding pavement. I gave it 10 out of 10 for originality!

Early Monday evening I flew out to attend a meeting in Portland the following day while Garry flew directly to Dallas. I then joined him 36 hours later after a punishingly short red-eye flight from Portland. Follow this link to learn more about our time in Texas.