First state past Louisiana,

second state, and finally

Florida!!  We were surprised by the great roads, useful signage, and interesting dead things along the side of the road. Mainly we saw smooshed alligators along with some raccoons, and a fox.  Carl Hiaason wrote a bunch of funny books with a character named Skink who was a former governor but walked off the job into the bush one day.  He ate a lot of road kill.  I’m sure he would have done well along this stretch of interstate!

In Pensacola we discovered the National Naval Aviation Museum.  We spent the entire day there and as you might suspect, Mark was in seventh heaven!

Marine One and Mark emulating Tricky Dick!!

Trying to one-up old high school pal, Mark Dove, Mark tries out the cockpit of a Blue Angel jet.

Blue Angel planes in the atrium of the museum. Incredible!!  And, yes, they are full-sized!

For Stewart Miller. This is the first plane to land in Antarctica. Mark told everyone about your tour there!  This incredible museum has planes from the Wright Brothers to the fastest jets of today.  Many of the refurbished planes are ones of a kind and many of them were resurrected from Lake Michigan where they crashed during training in WWII.  This place was well worth the visit!!

Tomorrow we are off to Tallahassee and then DISNEY WORLD!!!

Crossing into Louisiana.

On a drizzly day we set out from Houston to New Orleans.  The ride was pretty easy without traffic until we got nearer to our destination.  This is Lake Ponchitrain which I thought was the ocean at first it is so big.

Lovely and iconic New Orleans architecture.  We did Hop On Hop Off to get a feel for the city.  Basically it is divided into thirds:  The Garden District of stately old houses, The Vieux Carre or the old part of the city which is sub-divided into French and Spanish areas, and then the areas around the Old Market and Jackson Square which are basically in the Old Quarter.

This is one of the many old, above ground cemeteries found all over the city.  Very interesting. Seemed to me like a lot of famous people either came from or are buried here (New Orleans).

Continuing with our military theme, we visited the National World War II Museum. This very interesting museum chronicals the war as seen from the eyes of the soldiers.  At the outset we were given dog tags belonging to a soldier and we followed his story through the war.  ‘My’ soldier was John Morgan who was rejected when he tried to sign up because he had broken his neck so he went to Canada and joined the RCAF.  He went to England and fought courageously and was finally accepted into the USAF.  He earned a Congressional Medal of Honor and was then shot down and captured.  He made it out alive and was a great example of the bravery and single mindedness seen in so many of that generation’s soldiers.

And, finally there was the food!  Beignets at Cafe du Monde,

Chicken gumbo and crab deviled eggs at Mannings (yes, the father of Eli and Peyton),

And finally a taste of jambalaya, gumbo, and etouffe at Huck Finn’s.  I’ve gained 5 lbs so far.

Johnson Space Center, Houston.   Mark is dancing with excitement as we walk in the door!  I’m also pretty floored.  This stuff is HUGE.

One of the fantastic displays in the Space Center. Everything is life-sized and the scale is difficult to describe.

Mark, wishing he had been chosen to command a space shuttle.

My favorite picture in a gallery of magical shots.

Mark went to school with a fellow who designed the rocket system for the Apollo missions.  I was pretty awed when I met him because how often do you really meet a rocket scientist?!  Anyway, this is the business end of the rocket launching system for the Gemini missions.  It was never used due to budgetary cutbacks.

Two football fields later you get to the command module where the crew live.  Compared to all the sections used to get it into space, it just seemed tiny!

This is the actual room in which astronauts train before they are sent to the International Space Station.  Each unit here is a perfect mock-up of a corresponding one up there.  The floor is rigged so that it uses air to hoist the people and give the illusion of weightlessness.

Orion will be the next mission to be launched maybe as soon as 2018.  This is the crew module which is hardly bigger than our car and will accommodate the crew during a six month flight into deep space.  The mission is to wrangle an asteroid and haul it back to put into orbit maybe around the moon and excavate. Okay, I’ve seen those movies and nothing good EVER comes of that.

We also drove to Galveston.  It is a really pretty town on the gulf coast with waves crashing and seagulls flying in the sun, that’s Galveston.  I liked this cemetery because of all the pretty flowers growing wild.  It seemed like a happier place to spend eternity.

As you can see, much of Pueblo El Mirage is occupied for the summer and we are also dealing with

because most of us are lost in our eternal “old person fog” so Mark and I took off a few days late.  The bus took to beeping again on tthe day we were all loaded up and ready to leave and it took the wonderful guys at RV Master Tech a morning to get it running again with the additive Mark calls diabolical grease ( really dielectric grease).

Our first enchanting stop was New Mexico where we spent a boogie night in Lordsburg.

The next day we saw this really huge roadrunner at the gas station just before we

And entered

Texas, if you couldn’t guess.

sorry, Miles and Karen, Texas isn’t in our top 50 States.  It took us 2 hours to go 18 miles in Houston.

But I did see something I’ve been looking for my whole life…

The SECOND Baptist church!  I’ve seen the first one hundreds of times, so I was really glad to find this one!

So, to recap:  Four days on the road through West Texas being entertained by county names because the towns are so few and far between, horrendous traffic from San Antonio on, and finally getting to Houston in rush hour traffic on a Friday night.

Getting there was not fun!  Things must get better!

PS. When I get back in the Fall, if the signs are still up I’m getting out my magic marker.