After we came from Chicago, we then headed to Texas on our nineteenth day in the United States. That time, we were scheduled to stay in Texas from May 5 until May 8. Since we had limited time in our hands, we decided that it will be best for our family to take the plane instead of traveling from Chicago to Texas by land. At ten in the morning on the 5th of May, we checked out of our apartment and headed to Chicago O’Hare airport.
We arrived at Houston George Bush International airport a little before five in the afternoon. Since we were all tired from checking out in Chicago and flying to Texas, we opted to rest and saved all the places for us to go to for the next day.
On our second day in Texas, we ate our breakfast in our apartment and left to go to the NASA Space Center in Houston just after lunch. From our apartment, we took a twenty-two minute Uber ride to the space station.
Generally when you mention NASA many people imagine one single large HQ controlling all the American space program. But did you know that NASA actually has 18 centers and facilities in the United States?
One of the most important is located in Houston, Texas. Just remember the movie Apollo 13 and that sentence Tom Hanks made worldwide famous: “Houston, we have a problem”. Yes, he was referring to the folks in this control center.
This space center in Houston is called Johnson Space Center. Best of all: you can visit it. The visitor’s center is Space Center Houston, a nonprofit foundation which attracts 1 million people every year. Seeing my son and husband were geeks when it comes to travel and transportation, they enjoyed touring the center very much.
The main attraction here is the Boeing 747 that for 42 years was utilized 223 times to transport space shuttles. It’s called “shuttle carrier aircraft”. That’s why you see one aircraft on top of the other. The real one is on the bottom (there are only 2 of these). The one on top is a high-fidelity space shuttle replica, named Independence. You can get inside both.
We stayed for about three hours there before heading to The Galleria Mall. We got to the shopping place via Uber. The ride wasn’t that long. It was a fifteen-minute ride from the NASA Space Center. When we got to the Galleria, we never thought that we could see a lot of retailer and designer brands there. The place was not crowded in fact it’s almost empty as we went on a weekday but unfortunately we did not find any souvenir stores so we decided to transfer to Chinatown and buy souvenirs after grabbing a quick snack.
For our last full day in Texas, we treated it as our free day. We didn’t have many places to go to in Texas. The highlight of our trip was seeing the NASA Space Center. But it was during this day that we got to explore the neighborhood our apartment was in. We had our lunch at a local restaurant called Papa’s Bar-B-Q. After eating, we took some more time roaming the streets of Texas before we went back to our apartment to rest and prepare for our flight to Boston the next day.