Texas - Part 2

San Antonio - Day 1

Two days before the solar eclipse we moved closer to the path of totality by traveling from Houston to San Antonio. On the way we stopped at a Buc-ee's country store/gas station extravaganza.

Visiting the huge Buc-ee's was quite an experience! In spite of all the tacky kitsch on display, there were lots of good things available for travelers. Here you could find an enormous variety of sandwiches, fresh baked goods, snacks, travel essentials, and, most important, absolutely spotless, well maintained restrooms. I witnessed a restroom attendant actually scrubbing down the walls of a stall!

We had fun looking at the merchandise available.

For a brief moment I considered buying this sign which accurately expressed my introverted nature and the stress I felt during the tour from expected socializing with other tour members, especially at breakfast!

I've heard a Buc-ee's will soon be constructed along Interstate 64 near our Virginia home. Looks like managers will have a good salary.

Eventually, we arrived in San Antonio where I survived another spicy menu minefield at lunch near a lively farmer's market. After lunch we visited the San Jose Mission, one of five old Spanish missions arrayed along the San Antonio River. This mission was founded in 1720. The missions' purpose was to colonize the region for Spain and convert the native population to the Catholic faith. The priests somehow convinced natives to do most of the heavy labor. My understanding is that it wasn't particularly pleasant for natives. The next picture shows their living quarters.

The church and surrounding grounds were carefully reconstructed in the 1930's.

(Notice the increasingly cloudy sky in the previous three pictures. Eclipse viewing conditions were deteriorating as each day passed.)

I wonder what the indigenous people thought about the colorful decorated church interior.

An interior room in the walled enclosure near the church gave a good idea of life here on the edge of the Spanish Empire in the mid-1700's.

We left Mission San Jose and drove to Mission San Antonio de Valero, better known as the Alamo. (Where does the name Alamo come from? Apparently, this was the name of a nearby group of trees, either poplars or cottonwoods, called alamo in Spanish.) Unlike relatively rural Mission San Jose, the Alamo sits right in the middle of modern San Antonio surrounded by modern city buildings, streets, and traffic. We crossed a busy street, walked on an urban sidewalk, turned a corner, and there it was. It was strange to finally stand directly in front of this famous building I had heard so much about.

Like many people my age, the Alamo is stamped in my memory from watching Walt Disney TV episodes about Davy Crockett which ran as a series of one-hour programs in 1954-55 when I was a kid. We all loved Davy Crockett and had coonskin hats. The linoleum on my childhood bedroom floor had Davy Crockett images and pictures of the Alamo. So it was fun to encounter this wonderful sculpture of Crockett in front of the Alamo.

There's more to the Alamo than the iconic front face. Inside the front door was a church whose interior seemed quite bare compared with the San Jose Mission.

There was a walled compound associated with the Alamo which you can see in this informative poster illustrating the 1836 battle. It would have been nice to get a better picture, but too many people blocked access to a head on shot.

On the grounds were several sculptures of famous people associated with the Alamo including Jim Bowie and William Travis. Both featured prominently in my Disney memories. Bowie is shown with his famous knife, and Travis is shown using his sword to mark a line on the ground. Travis asked Alamo defenders to cross the line if they were willing to fight to the end, and everyone but one person crossed.

After the Alamo we went to our San Antonio hotel, the Gunter Hotel. Unlike our ultramodern Houston hotel, the Gunter was constructed and opened more than a hundred years ago in 1909. It had a certain antique charm. Here's a panoramic view of the lobby.

Original old-time mail chutes were present near elevators on each floor. I assume letters were dropped into the chute where they fell and accumulated in the large box below near elevators in the lobby.

The original old fashioned telephone switchboard was on display in the lobby.

Our evening dinner was a group affair for all tour participants at a nearby Tex/Mex restaurant located just above the San Antonio Riverwalk. A spicy minefield buffet was offered in a noisy, crowded setting. We didn't last long at the restaurant. Upon leaving we descended a convenient staircase and found ourselves on the Riverwalk itself. After a short walk along the waterway we had this view looking backward toward the restaurant which is the area with curved lights just above the left end of the bridge.

Just by chance we had chosen to walk in a direction away from the busier parts of the Riverwalk. It was relatively peaceful here and we came across a few tile mosaic artworks.

As the path became more quiet and isolated we decided to turn around and explore the other direction. It wasn't long before we encountered increasing crowds jostling us on the narrow walkway. If we had continued for another few minutes, we would have come to a brightly lit section with restaurants, shops, and nightlife. But we were getting tired, so we turned around and walked back to the hotel. On the way to the hotel we passed one of the illuminated horse drawn carriages roaming the streets.

Our tour guide presented the next day's agenda on a white board in the lobby.

Eclipse day was approaching and weather prospects were not improving.

Texas - Part 1

Houston

Many months ago on a day when I felt unusually energetic we spontaneously made a decision to witness the last total solar eclipse occurring within the continental USA in our lifetimes. Sites in Texas had the best chance for clear skies, so we signed up for a week-long eclipse tour with TravelQuest International, a company we had good experiences with in the past. Four days before the eclipse we arrived in Houston for the beginning of the tour.

As the transport SUV drove us from the airport to our downtown hotel we were glad to have this service provided as part of the tour package. The bewildering array of signs, lane changes, off ramps, and incredible fast moving traffic would have been a nightmare to negotiate on our own. We were delivered to the palatial 26-story hotel in late morning and checked into our 19th floor room. Here are views of the hotel atrium.

After grabbing a late breakfast we had free time before the tour officially began with an evening welcome dinner. We walked a couple blocks in lovely warm 80-degree weather to nearby Sam Houston Park where we enjoyed strolling among old houses, sculptures, and monuments placed in the midst of surrounding high rise buildings. The pastoral 1900's look of the park made an interesting contrast with skyscrapers in the background.

The Saint John Church in the previous picture was built by German and Swiss immigrants in 1891 and moved to its present location.

This shaded sculpture of three coyotes around a water hole was one of the nicest on display.

I enjoyed inspecting the armillary sphere among roses. The sphere's gold-tipped central diameter, parallel to Earth's rotational axis, points to the north celestial pole at Houston's latitude. It acts as a sundial gnomon. The wide circumferential band with golden markings in a plane perpendicular to the gnomon is parallel to Earth's equatorial plane. The outer surface of the equatorial strip is decorated with zodiac signs, although the actual zodiac constellations are in the ecliptic plane (Earth's orbital plane), not Earth's equatorial plane. The inner equatorial strip surface is marked with hours upon which the gnomon shadow falls as the Sun progresses across the daylight sky. With appropriate corrections provided by a detailed plaque on the base the time of day can be read from this sundial.

The park featured a number of old restored houses from the 1800's and early 1900's. Except for one house not pictured here, all these houses were acquired, moved to the park, and restored. One of the most interesting was the 1868 Pillot House whose wonderful dog sculptures greeted visitors entering the grounds. The original sculptures were cast iron and ordered in the 1870's. The present replicas are bronze.

The yellow 1868 San Filipe House was another attractive residence.

The oldest restored house on the grounds was the 1823 cabin built by one of Stephen Austin's original colonists.

By holding my camera up to grimy windows I was able to get two images of the interior.

The yellow 1850 Nichols-Rice-Cherry House also had a restored interior which I was able to view through dirty windows.

On this day, four days before the solar eclipse, the sky was blue without a single cloud. We hoped in vain these good conditions would last. We returned to the hotel and rested a bit before the tour's official welcome dinner that night.

The next morning we headed by bus to NASA's Johnson Spaceflight Center. It took four separate buses to transport 135 people in our group, the largest group we had ever experienced on TravelQuest tours. The drive to NASA revealed a rather unattractive side of Houston - incredibly heavy traffic on expressways 5 or 6 lanes wide with rundown depressing buildings often lining the roadway.

Eventually, we arrived at the Spaceflight Center and initially sat in a large room for a talk by a retired astronaut. I expected a possibly disappointing lecture, but the astronaut, instead,  only answered audience questions for 1.5 hours. His funny, self-deprecating, naval aviator dialog was entertaining and informative. I sensed he could have gone on for another half hour and no one would have minded.

After the astronaut finished we went outside to view an actual plane that ferried space shuttles across the country. A panoramic photo was necessary to capture this enormous pair. This plane had accomplished 167 ferry flights! Standing beneath this giant combination it was hard to imagine how all this mass could ever fly, but science works!

Next, we boarded a tour tram and headed out to see other things located around the sprawling complex. Along the way we passed some longhorned cattle on NASA grounds. It would have been a shame to be in Texas and not see one of the famed longhorns.

We first stopped at a building housing a complete Saturn V moon rocket. This equipment was "flight ready" at one time after the last moon landing. It would have been Apollo 18, but never flew because the moon landings ended after Apollo 17. I've seen full-sized Apollo rockets before, but it's always amazing to stand next to one in awe of the size.

The next three pictures show the third, second, and first stage rocket engines respectively. The mind boggling complexity of pipes and pumps is on full display.

The big first stage F-1 engines were incredible. Each one of these produced 1.5 million pounds of thrust. The five engine combination on the first stage produced a total thrust of 7.5 million pounds burning kerosene and liquid oxygen. This controlled explosion lifted the huge Apollo moon rocket to a height of 38 miles and a speed of about 6,000 mph before burning out. You can judge the size of this enormous device by comparing with the man standing next to it.

Our next stop was the simulation building where astronauts train in simulated components of the International Space Station as well as in various space capsules like the Orion capsule and Boeing's Starliner. The next two panoramic pictures show the layout we saw spread out below us as we strolled on a walkway above.

The second picture shows the Zarya and Zvezda Russian modules of the Space Station. Zarya means dawn or sunrise in Russian and was the first module launched. It's also known as the (less poetic) "Functional Cargo Block" and is now used mostly for storage. Zvezda means star in Russian. It was the third module launched and provided living quarters and life support.

Our next stop was the Mission Control Center. The simulation building was the first real time operating facility we saw. I hoped we would see a real time operating control room, but that didn't happen.

Instead, we were ushered into an accurate restoration of the actual Apollo mission control room of 1969. The restoration was so good it even included ash trays full of cigarette butts, a sign of how ubiquitous smoking was in 1969 compared to today. Check out the old telephones and pencil and papers - relics of the past. Virtually everyone in the 1969 room would have been a white male with short hair wearing a white shirt and tie. It's nice to see more diverse control rooms these days.

I was surprised by what happened next. The whole restored room was activated and set to display what actually appeared on screens as Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon in July, 1969. A good portion of the final moments of the first moon landing was played out in front of us with all the displays and screens changing in real time as they did on that famous day. I found myself caught up in the drama and had an unexpected emotional reaction to reliving this iconic moment for the second time in my life.

From the mission control building we returned to the visitor center for some hours of free time to get lunch and see the museum there. The noisy cafeteria was very crowded with limited food choices. We were lucky to find a table to sit. After lunch I quickly tired of the museum displays. They didn't offer much new for me because I follow NASA information regularly. In addition, the museum was packed with jostling kids and a cacophony of loud competing sounds. We retreated outside to more peaceful shaded picnic tables to await the return of our tour bus which eventually took us back through more horrendous Houston traffic to our hotel. 

We were free to find our own dinner, so we walked several blocks to a food court where I negotiated several spicy menu minefields to find something I could eat. Along the way we passed the interesting wall mural shown below.

The next morning we left Houston for San Antonio. Sunny weather continued for our journey, but a dreadful cloudy forecast for the upcoming solar eclipse day was unchanged.