Houston

This is the companion to the earlier Dallas post. In Dallas we stayed in a hotel near the airport, and we were tired and didn't do anything special. In Houston my compadre on the trip had done some research and had booked our hotel in the Galleria district.

We actually only saw the center of Houston from miles away the following morning enroute to the airport and NC - this area is just a posh secondary business district, like Tysons is for DC. We checked in about an hour before sunset and got out and walked. I never feel like I've really been in a place unless I walk through it.

One of the lovely things about the Galleria district is the live oaks. They are all over it, in parking lots, along wide avenues...

It's great to see the modern buildings through and above these lovely Southern trees.

On the way to Houston we had gotten off the highway to travel some of the back roads and see the East Texas countryside. In an earlier post I showed a photo from one of these side trips. The back roads in Texas are called Farm Roads. I grinned when I took this picture and I asked my friend what he thought they grew on this farm.

Inside the Galleria mall (one of the largest in America) is an ice skating rink. At this mall we got a beer (I a local lager and he a black and tan - $13 for the two of them!) and sat outside and enjoyed the sun going down and the fresh cooling breeze.

Outside after sunset we saw how things were lit, and could better appreciate the way everything was chrome plated. Light poles, arches over the streets, and street signs like this one.

We wandered around a while longer, had steak dinners on the veranda in front of a western grill, with big braziers flaming on pillars on the stairs up to it, and then headed back to our room and crashed.