Springbreak in Texas

I am back from my Springbreak roadtrip in Texas. This was one of my usual roadtrip-type vacation and this time I took a brand new car with 129 miles on the odometer and returned it with 1755 more including 50 on dirt roads... Yeah Texas is big and interesting landmarks are far apart... Actually, Texas has the same size as my home country...

My wandering in Texas...

The roadtrip started at Houston Hobby airport and ended there. During the five or so days, I drove to San Antonio, Del Rio, Big Bend National Park, Fort Stockton, Austin, Port Lavaca, and finally Galveston on the Gulf coast.

The first surprise was the city of San Antonio itself. I never ever suspected it could be that interesting. From historical landmarks to fancy touristic places, from Missions to Skyscrapers, there is something interesting for everyone.

.

Perhaps the most famous landmark is The Alamo mission which hosted one of the most famous fight of the Mexican-Texas war. A bloodshed fight epitomized by the movie The Alamo featuring John Wayne and Richard Widmark.

.

Other landmarks include the Missions and mark the Northernmost part of the Spanish explorations of the 17th and 18th centuries.

.

The Spanish Missions in Texas are a series of religious outposts established by Spaniards to spread the Christian faith amongst native Americans with the added benefit of giving Spain a toehold in the frontier land...

.

Next came Big Bend National Park. Big Bend is situated along the Mexican-American border and lays in the middle of the largest North American desert : the Chihuahua Desert.

Balanced Rock is one of the many icons of Big Bend National Park

.

Lion Warning...

.

Scary right...

.

Good way to let visitors feel allright when they are starting a three hour treck in the wilderness...

.

No I did not spot any mountain lion. I would have loved to though...

.

.

.

.

.

Even closer to the Mexican border stands the Santa Elena Canyon.

.

The Santa Elena canyon was made by the Rio Grande river and now stands as the Mexican - American border. Millions of years of erosion have carved those 1000 feet high cliffs.

.

Not that wide of a river as the reader might see. Not very deep too as I strongly believe that one could cross it while standing on both legs. But the surrounding environment is as wild and as arid as can be... so this might be a strong deterrent for aspiring illegal crossers...

Arid prairies in South Texas

One of the last stop was Austin, the capital of Texas. So obviously there is a Capitole...but besides the Capitole I was not able to find anything very special in this town... Keep Austin weird as they keep on saying. Ok ok...

The Capitole where "W" used to work as Governor of Texas

Finally upon return to Houston, I payed a visit to the Johnson Space Center which is hosting the space crew training facilities and the mission control center. It is in this very room below that all the Apollo program missions were monitored and surveyed in the 60's and 70's including the famed Apollo 11 and the Apollo 13 missions.

.

As one might see, there are no keyboard, no mouse, basically nothing to communicate with the computers. In fact, computer screens were used to monitor different parameters but there was absolutely no interactions between the people working here and the systems. Also, the main computer running the show was a state of the art 400kb ram-memory equipped computer... Ah those days...

Mission Control Center. At the time of the Apollo missions, the average age of people working in this very room was 26. Would you believe that ?

.

Nowadays, the center holds additional rooms. One of which is dedicated to the monitoring of the International Space Station and the other one is dedicated to the Orbiter missions. During my visit, the NASA people were busy taking care of the on-going Endeavour mission that brought the Canadian robot-arm Dexter to the ISS as well as a Japanese Laboratory.

You may find a movie of this trip here. Please enjoy!!