We get a close-up look at downtown Houston on our search for Butterfly World. Photo by Glenn.
This is cool. The skyscrapers in Texas' largest cities all look like something out of Star Trek. Photo by Glenn.
Sam Houston will forever ride tall in the saddle in his namesake town. This statue is across from Butterfly World. Photo by Glenn.
Here is the exterior of Butterfly World. Looks like some sort of sports arena. Photo by Glenn.
Ben can hardly wait to go inside. This is what we have been talking about for a week or so, and now Butterfly World is just a few yards away. Photo by Glenn.
Ben takes his butterfly hunt very seriously. Armed with an identification chart, he and Mom try to figure out which butterflies are fluttering about inside the giant glass dome. Photo by Glenn.
This large butterfly is called a Great Owl. Photo by Roni.
Butterflies congregate at a feeder, which makes them a sitting duck for our camera. Photo by Roni.
Another butterfly sits on a leaf, seemingly unfazed by our presence. That's probably a good thing, as hundreds of people visit Butterfly World every day. Visitors aren't allowed to touch the butterflies. Photo by Roni.
Dad and Ben pause during our butterfly hunt. Ben is becoming quite the expert on the different varieties. Photo by Roni.
Did we say visitors aren't allowed to touch the butterflies? True, unless they are dead and they are handed to you by a museum docent. Photo by Roni.
This was somebody's pet iguana once, but when it suddenly became homeless it wound up at Butterfly World. Iguanas are vegetarians and apparently don't bother the butterflies. Photo by Roni.
After Butterfly World, we ventured back to downtown Houston and walked around for a few minutes. Ben checks out a large tiled fountain that is in a park near where we parked our rental car. Photo by Glenn.
Another look at the Houston skyline. Just a few puffy clouds on an otherwise gorgeously clear day. Photo by Glenn.
In Galveston, Landry's Oyster Bar is located just down the street from the cruise terminal. It advertises the "best salad bar on the island." Photo by Glenn.
The interior of Landry's Oyster Bar is reminiscent of a 1930s soup kitchen. Well, at least this angle was. Photo by Glenn.
Ben digs into one of Landry's famous salads. Photo by Glenn.
This statue of the seagull boy has gone to the birds about as much as the birds have gone on it. Think the critter perched at upper right knows a good thing when he lands on it? Photo by Glenn.
Galveston's famous Strand harkens back to the Victorian era. A horse and buggy awaits passengers. Photo by Glenn.
Passengers aboard a Celebration cruise ship congregate near the rail as their ship prepares to leave port. (Hey look, there's some guy on shore taking our picture!) Photo by Glenn.
Moody Gardens is like the Waikiki of Galveston, and they've even got there own palm trees. The gardens include several museums, a hotel, an IMAX theater and room to stroll. Photo by Glenn.
Roni observes the flamingos through glass at the Rainforest Pyramid in Moody Gardens. Photo by Glenn.
Wonder if we can borrow a couple of these to stick on our front lawn? Photo by Glenn.
Behind the museum complex there is a promenade where you can walk along the perimeter of Galveston Island (not the entire island, which is very large) and view the gulf. Glenn seems to attract steamboats, as here he is posing with another one near the Marina at Moody Gardens. That may be the Colonel paddlewheeler, which resides here. Photo by Roni.
Roni leans against the observation rail. This view is looking toward the area of Moody Gardens dubbed Palm Beach. We didn't go for the walk, but it looks like there was a lot more to see than the little area where we were. Photo by Glenn.
The sun is beginning to set on the last day of our visit to Texas. That may be the Aquarium Pyramid, one of the three pyramid museums that include the Rainforest Pyramid and Discovery Pyramid. There is a convention center somewhere nearby, a Vietnam memorial, volleyball courts... You (and your wallet) could easily get lost here. Photo by Glenn.
Hitting the road without a Pepsi would be simply unthinkable. Roni and Ben tried in vain to get these vending machines to work, although they did come out a couple of nickels ahead when the machines spit their money back. Photo by Glenn.
To spend the day in Galveston and not go down to the beach would be nothing short of criminal. This area has some of the nicest beaches (OK, some of the only beaches) in the South. The waves were gentle and the water warm. That's the U.S.S. Flagship Hotel in the background, which juts 1,000 feet out into the water. They encourage you to bring your fishing gear if you stay there. Maybe next time. Photo by Roni.
Ben has a handful of shells he found along the beach. This area is a shell collector's dream. Photo by Roni.
See, we all got to stand in the water. Ben, naturally, had additional fun kicking the waves at Mom and Dad. Photo by Roni.
The Quality Inn in Humble wins the prize for longest hallways of the places where we stayed this trip. Our room is somewhere waaaaaay near the end of this corridor. Photo by Glenn.
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Galveston
Thursday, September 30 (Day 14) — As I write this it is about 11 p.m. and I am sitting at the round dining table in our hotel room listening to the rain fall and birds twittering among the trees. No, we didn't just get hit with a surprise thunder shower -- I am listening to a nature CD called "American Wilds" that I picked up at Barnes & Noble this afternoon. I bought it because it has a couple of tracks with crickets and cicadas that every time I listen to it will bring back memories of this incredible vacation we've had exploring the Deep South. Sadly, this is our last night on the road -- or is that thankfully? Yes, I have mixed emotions about our impending trip home to California tomorrow morning. On the one hand it is always good to be home again after a long vacation, but on the other I will miss the freedom of combing the backroads and checking out new and unusual places every day, as we have done for the past two weeks.
We made the most of our final full day in Texas, waking up just before 7:30 so that we could be showered and dressed in time to catch the continental breakfast in the hotel lobby that ended at 8 o'clock. No sleeping in late here. Ya snooze and ya lose breakfast! It was an amazing feat to have all of us out the door at 7:50. We'll have to do it again tomorrow when we leave before 6:30 to catch our 9:20 plane flight. As it turned out, we wouldn't have missed much by missing the hotel's offerings -- they put out a box of tiny danishes and a tray of orange juice and chocolate milk on ice. No napkins, just tissues. Too few seats for too few tables. We huddled in one corner and ate while four men who spoke in Spanish congregated in the other corner. This hotel is fairly lame, I've decided. They've been repaving the parking lots both days we've been here, so the restaurant has been closed. The gift shop has postcards, but there are just a half dozen designs and most of those are almost sold out. There is a whirlpool tub in our bathroom, but the jets aren't hooked to anything so it doesn't work. There is Internet service, but only as a pay-per-use kiosk in the lobby, and the touch screen is broken. The one saving grace -- OK, two -- is that it is cheap AND close to the airport. For that it will be worth its weight in gold tomorrow.
Breakfast done, we went back to the room and tidied up before driving into downtown Houston on Highway 59 south. We deposited ourselves at Minute Maid Park where the Houston Astros play baseball. It is the former Enron Field, but we all know what happened to Enron three years ago -- the corporate moniker has been forever erased from the Houston skyline, but the ballpark is a magnificent structure. It provides a nice entryway into a modern downtown with wide streets, a lot of public art, just a few skyscrapers and a ton of history. One of my regrets at the end of this trip will be that we didn't have enough time to explore Dallas, San Antonio or Houston. You could probably spend a week in each one and still not see it all, but Houston in particular seems to hold a lot of attractions. The one we had decided on checking out was the Cockrell Butterfly World inside Houston's natural history museum in the center of town. We snaked our way through the downtown area until we found Main Street, which took us to where we needed to be. I am still impressed with the fact that you can drive through these giant American cities during the height of the business day and not get caught in major traffic. I have never experienced this phenomenon in San Francisco or Sacramento, and can't imagine it ever occurring in Los Angeles. Perhaps we just got lucky, but it seems like more than mere coincidence.
The park in which the butterfly center is located is large and beautiful. The city zoo takes up a fair amount of space, while the history museum complex is at the opposite end of the park. There is a large statue of Sam Houston at the park's entrance across from the butterfly attraction. Butterfly World is a bargain at $5 for adults and $3.50 for kids. Ben had been looking forward to seeing it ever since Roni first read about it in one of our tour books, and we thought that with all of the other places we had dragged him to on this trip that he deserved something where he could have fun going in. The place consists of a museum dedicated to etymology which is connected to a giant dome in which hundreds of butterflies roam freely for visitors to enjoy. I've seen a similar attraction at Marine World in Vallejo, but you never tired of a place where so much of nature's beauty is concentrated into such a small space.
We had arrived at Butterfly World the same time as a large group of elementary school kids, so we tried to pace ourselves to keep ahead of their tour. Ben had a blast. A docent gave him a huge laminated card that shows several of the butterfly species on display, and he wandered through the exhibit identifying them for us. Even tonight he could still remember names of the butterflies that Roni and I have already forgotten. An elderly man and woman who reminded me quite a lot of my grandparents Henry were inside the butterfly dome with a tray full of dead butterflies that they were letting visitors hold. I presume they were both volunteers who had an obvious love for nature. The woman -- her name was Barbara -- told us that the butterflies on Ben's card were only a small sample of the species that can be found in Butterfly World. She gave Roni some information on how to attract butterflies to our own back yard. I think having plants besides weeds would be a good start. Barbara also pointed out a very large iguana that had taken up residence in one of the trees inside the dome. Apparently it was someone's abandoned pet. Good thing for the butterflies that it is a vegetarian.
We looked at some of the mounted insect specimens before checking out the museum gift shops and heading for our next destination. Roni thought that if we parked downtown we might have some luck finding Houston postcards. There was supposed to be a visitor center on Commerce Street across from a park. But when we parked near the address of the center shown in our tour guide and walked over to check it out, we discovered that it apparently had closed some time ago. It wasn't a big deal. I told Roni that I appreciated her thinking of my postcard habit, but I wasn't about to start panicking until tomorrow, because I saw some good gift shops in the airport. I won't leave Houston without checking out those shops. Besides, it was already getting on toward noon and we were losing time to check out Galveston, which was an hour drive south of the city.
I gassed up the car before picking up Highway 59 south, then transferring onto local highway 6 to take us toward Galveston. Somewhere outside of Sugarland we stopped at a Barnes & Noble, where i picked up my nature CDs and Roni bought a calendar featuring longhorn steers. For all the talk about how Texas is longhorn country, we've only seen maybe a half dozen. It was close to 2:30 by the time we made it into Galveston, mainly because the road we chose to get there passes through a lot of small towns. It was a pretty drive, taken in good weather with low humidity but somewhat poor air quality. That has been typical of most of our trip. I think the temperature was perhaps close to 90 degrees in Galveston.
Galveston is your typical funky beach community, but it appears much larger than the 57,000-plus population stated on its city limit sign. Much of the community has received historic landmark status. There are a number of stately Victorian homes that today are museums along the main drag. The Victorian architecture extends to The Strand, which is a row of storefronts dating to the 1830s. This is where I found my fill of Galveston-area postcards. We had lunch at Landry's Oyster Bar, which boasted the "best salad bar on the island." I don't know that it was the best, but it is what Ben had for lunch. I had a crawfish po-boy sandwich. It was OK, but I hadn't expected my crawfish to be breaded. We wrapped up lunch and then wandered through The Strand for a bit to get the most of our validated parking ticket. By the time we came back to the car we got to watch a carnival cruise ship departing the Galveston port. That boat was huge, and it was packed with vacationers heading to I-don't-know-where. Does it really matter? I know just what they were thinking as they stood on that boat, watching us take their picture from afar -- they were thinking this was the last time they would see home until the ship returns to port. They were excited about the promise their getaway holds, for fun and adventure. Boat, plane, train, mo-ped... makes no difference. The feeling of hitting the road for vacation is pretty universal -- as is the feeling of nearing the end of one.
It was past 4 p.m. and getting late in the day when we arrived at Moody Gardens. We didn't need to pay money to check out the museums housed there, but we couldn't resist visiting this unique complex housed inside three pyramids that stands out as you enter Galveston on I-45. Each pyramid holds a different attraction -- a rainforest, an aquarium, and a discovery center.. We looked around the lobby, took some pictures of the flamingos feeding, wandered along the promenade near the Gulf inlet, then moved on. We finished our visit to Galveston by stopping along the seawall and walking down to the beach so we could dip our toes in the Gulf of Mexico. Roni and Ben are usually more into such things than I am, but she convinced me to take off my shoes and socks and wade into the shallows. I knew the water would be warm, but I was surprised it wasn't warmer. The beach is packed with tiny shells and fine white sand that doesn't cling to you like the white sands around the California Bay Area. I'm kicking myself now that I didn't package a sample to take home. A few people were fishing off one of the breakwaters. There were a couple of sunbathers nearby. A mom and her kids were playing surfside just as we were. There wasn't much surf here, just a few gentle waves, which was all we needed to have a good time. I guess we can say our trip is complete now that the journey ended with sand and ocean.
I let Roni drive us back to the hotel. My left eye has been a bit strained the past couple of days -- probably because I am staying up late writing rather than resting. We followed I-45 north into Houston while a fiery orange sunset dipped below the horizon. I watched the last rays fade and realized it would be the last sunset we would see in Texas. Couldn't have asked for a prettier one. We gor back to the hotel around 7:30, topped up the fuel tank of the rental car in preparation for its return tomorrow morning (fingers crossed!), then organized our suitcases so that all the clean clothes are in one and the dirty clothes in another. I'm out of underwear, but I think I have just enough to get me through the plane flight home. We put all our souvenirs in the third suitcase, and pulled out a fourth travel bag we had brought along just to have room for our unused jackets and other miscellany. I'll never bring a coat again if I visit the South in the late summer -- never a day below 84 degrees these past two weeks.
The restaurant was still closed tonight and no one wanted to go out or order pizza again, so Roni checked out what was available in the upstairs lounge. We wound up eating club sandwiches and salad -- not the sort of big "last meal" I had hoped for on our final night here, but at least it was convenient. We watched part of the Bush-Kerry debate during dinner. Such a contrast in personalities and positions. If John Kerry loses in November do you think anyone will remember him 20 years from now? He has more support in Galveston than I have seen anywhere on this trip. Of course, Galveston is in one of about a half dozen Texas counties that Al Gore won in 2000, the others being in the southern tip of the state bordering Mexico. It must be something about the Gulf currents. Enough of politics...
I have to get to bed now or not even the alarm clock set on high volume will wake me in time to catch our plane. It's going to be an intense day tomorrow. The sounds of crickets in the country tonight have helped relax me.
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