Exploring South East Texas

What do downtown Houston, Galveston, the Johnson Space Center, and College Station, TX have in common? They are all places my friend Chris and I visited on our 30 hour adventure from Dallas on Thursday/Friday. While the trip was really short in length, it felt like we were gone for many days.

I must say that Houston is a pretty nice place to be. (Maybe I wouldn't say that if I was there in July when it's 110 degree with 110 percent humidity.) Downtown was really clean, many of the historic buildings were well restored. On our way to town, Chris and I had the crazy idea of parking our car at one of those park and ride places and riding the bus into downtown. After about 10 minutes of deciphering the mass transit mapping system, we boarded one of the buses that went into downtown.

Upon arriving downtown, we switched over to the monorail that went through town like an an ground-level subway system. We took the tram about as far as it could go to Reliant Stadium (the Houston Texans football stadium). Beside it was the old Astrodome. I must say it was one of the nastiest things I have ever seen. It was almost like they thought about tearing it down... say twenty years ago, decided against it, and then refused to maintain the premises for the last two decades. We then returned downtown and walked by Minute Maid Park (the Astros baseball stadium). (If you can't tell we are pretty big sports fans.) After eating dinner, we jumped on a bus and returned to our park and ride lot outside of town.

On the way back, we thought "why not go by College Station on the way back to Dallas?" So we headed down the back roads that led from greater Houston to College Station. Talk about "the back-side of nowhere!" One thing to note from this portion of the trip was that there were actually regular-sized trees. Unlike Dallas and westward, where the trees might get 30 ft. tall, there were actually some regular-sized trees, and I saw the first evergreen I have seen in probably 8 months. It felt like I was back in my home state of North Carolina.

Well, we got to college station about 8:30. We parked by Kyle Field (the fourth sports venue we had seen that day). The campus was pretty cool, and really big. I decided it was like a "Texas-sized" version of NC State (my alma mater), which makes sense considering they are both "aggie" schools.

Well, I have rambled far too long about our trip, so I will stop with the closing remarks being... I am glad I was able to get away, even if it was for only a short time. It was good to see some sites, and have a little a break before finishing out the rest of this grueling semester.

Glad to be a part of the "blogging" community, and look forward to posting sometime soon.

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