We only missed one exit, and ended up right downtown, but the GPS lady quickly directed us back on to the freeway and heading out the south end of town. We were heading for the Johnson Space Center which is just southeast of Houston, and we spent the rest of the morning there. Doreen thought this was really exciting, of course! Here's a picture of the rocket that was used to put the first astronauts into space (the one on the left of the picture:
What amazed me was the small size of this rocket - it almost looked like a toy. But then there was the Saturn V moon rocket - what amazed me about this was it's large size. Here's a picture of the bottom end with it's 5 engines:
And here's the second stage:
And the third stage:
As you can see, these are just big fuel tanks with rocket engines at the bottom:
The lunar lander gets tucked somewhere into this stage:
Then there is the tiny capsule that returns the astronauts to earth:
After I finally dragged Doreen out of there kicking and screaming, we drove a short distance to Brazo Bend State Park (N29 23 04.0, W95 35 53.2), which is south and a little west of Houston. The main attraction at this park is the Alligators, and we went for a walk shortly after we arrived and got this picture:
Now, the weather was still warm and muggy, but we made a remarkable discovery today! Sitting on top of the motorhome, there is an air conditioner! We very seldom use this because we seldom camp in very warm weather, and when we do camp in warm weather it is quite often in places that have no electrical connection. So it had sort of slipped our minds that we had this contraption up on the roof. Thus we suffered through the couple of nights of muggy weather while we were at Beth & Calvin's place. But, after this big discovery, we had a really comfortable night here at Brazo Bend.
I've gotten a little behind on my blog, and I've got another day or two of stuff to catch up on, but I'll let this do for now - we have to get on the road.
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