North America 2021 Roadtrip #3: New Orleans, Houston, Boca Chica
I spent the last full day in New Orleans having 6 Beignets, hot chocolate and what seemed like half a cup of powdered sugar for breakfast at the famous Cafe du Monde by the river in the French Quarter. Due to COVID and more pouring rain, there were about 4 people in the whole place. I also bought a tin of chicory coffee for later delivery to Rose Dutson Lovell Atkinson.
I then discovered that my plan to get a dry tour of the city on the Big Red Bus was foiled by it actually not running that day. So I did a search for indoor things to do and found the World War II museum. I walked over and wow, it is definitely among the top museums I’ve ever been to. It’s broken into the different theaters of war and each one takes you on a path through time from the leadup to the conclusion of battle. The exhibits were highly detailed and the panels explaining everything provided excellent context. At the end there’s a gallery of aircraft with bombers and fighters of the era, all hanging from the ceiling.
I then decided to jump on one of the street trolleys for a nostalgic spin through town. The closest stop was in Lee Circle, where there remains only a stone tower after the city took down a statue of the traitor and loser Robert E. Lee. Good job New Orleans! One down, a bunch more to go throughout the South. The trolley system, dating from 1835 and still running gorgeous wooden carriages, is electrically driven from an overhead wire and the train conductor operated the controls for the motor and brake like a musician playing his beloved instrument. The line goes west for about 30 minutes, far longer than I expected but it’s actually used as public transport in the area, not just a relic tourist attraction.
While coming back into the French Quarter I booked a walking tour of ghostly locations in the city. I personally don’t believe in ghosts but I’m entertained by the legends and storytelling behind them. Our guide Melissa was excellent, mixing city history with the stories of each location we came to. Luckily the constant rain had eased off by this point. I’ll put a little story onto each picture attached to this post. As we wrapped up the tour at 10pm I realized that I hadn’t had anything to eat since the beignets in the morning, so Melissa walked me to a bar near my hotel where I inhaled a double-pepperoni pizza. If you’re ever in need of some ghostly adventures, be sure to get on Melissa’s tour. https://www.facebook.com/MissaLand
The next morning I packed up and pulled out of New Orleans and headed towards Houston. “Houston, we have a problem.” Sorry I couldn’t resist. Guess what the weather was like on the drive. Go ahead, guess! It rained. Not a little, but a lot, torrential. And it’s mostly under construction the whole way, and full of 18 wheelers doing 75+. I didn’t trust the car to self-drive in those conditions so my hands were white gripping the wheel for hours.
I arrived at my AirBnB in the Pearland neighbourhood in the southeast part of Houston, after nearly being funneled by heavy traffic into a no-cash, transponder-only tollroad. WTF? I dodged to an exit just before the point of no return. Ugh. My room in the family home is called The London Room because there’s a picture of a double-decker bus on the wall. There’s also the Paris Room and the Elegant Room. I haven’t been able to peek inside either one, but I expect big things. It’s near the NASA site which was my destination the next day. I took a much needed nap and then wrote up and published the video of my encounter with the SpaceX rocket boosters on the road in Florida.
In the morning I headed over and took a wrong turn. The working-space part of the complex is called the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center but the visitor complex is called Space Center Houston. Once I figured that out, I took the proper roads, bought my ticket and went inside. JSC has been the main mission control center for every manned space launch since Gemini 4 in 1965. Why is this mission control center so far away from the launch pads at Kennedy Space Center & Cape Canaveral in Florida you say? Great question. The answer is: Congress! Every member of Congress wants a slice of the federal budget and the best way for NASA to get started and continue with its goals was to spread the money around as much as possible. Vice President Johnson was put in charge of the manned space program by JFK who really wasn’t interested in it at all, even after his famous speech at Rice University where he announced the plan to put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. Johnson was previously a very powerful senator from Texas so the inevitable happened, and the site was renamed in his honour in 1973. KSC controls the rocket during assembly and launch until it literally goes up past the height of the tower, then JSC takes over. Can you imagine the logistical and communications and software and myriad other issues they had to work through simply to have two different control sites hand off control of a rocket in flight? Boggles the mind. At the time, NASA was getting 4% of the federal budget, essentially a blank check to make Kennedy’s plan a success and beat the Russians to the Moon. Now NASA gets less than one half of one percent of the budget. People complain that this is good money going to waste, thrown away when it could be doing better things on Earth. Well, if America can’t solve all of its problems with 99.5% of the entire budget, then that’s not NASA’s problem. Maybe look into those expensive military toilet seats, or 20 year wars.
Anyway, I went to the Astronaut talk, today given by Michael Forman of Space Shuttle mission STS-129. He did two spacewalks during the construction of the International Space Station. He’s now Mayor of the nearby town of Friendswood, and he gave a good talk about himself as a test pilot and test pilot instructor, his crewmates and the astronaut and spacewalk experience. I took the trolley tour of the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility where the astronauts train on various spacecraft and then saw the full Apollo Saturn V that’s made from flight-ready parts from the cancelled Apollo 18, 19 and 20 missions, no thanks to Tricky Dick Nixon! I tried tried to get the other trolley tour over to Mission Control but I missed the last one of the day, damn.
I went to a nearby cinema and slept through most of the movie Venom, and the parts I saw were terrible, don’t bother. I found a Harbor Freight tool store and Guitar Center in the same shopping plaza and just walked around with childlike wonder and just a little drool. Hitting the trifecta in that plaza I found a Thai massage shop and the lady went to work on my aching back and she also found the right side of my neck was mostly frozen which I think was contributing to the series of headaches I’ve had, maybe from sleeping on bad pillows or the driving stress.
Tomorrow I’m off to yet another spacy delight – the SpaceX Starbase in Boca Chica Texas! Couchsurfing completely crapped out on this location again, the only suggestion was a guy across the border in Matamoros Mexico. AirBnBs were way too expensive and I don’t need a whole house to myself so I’m booked in a reasonable hotel in nearby Brownsville for 5 days. It looks like my timing might be good for some activity with the Ship 20 + Booster 4 rocket that’s currently sitting on the launch pad, so fingers crossed! I’ve already checked and the whole area is a no-drone-fly-zone. Argh.
