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.