Our next stop after Austin was Houston where we would be staying with Peggy and Todd's cousin. The drive from Austin was short and uneventful and we arrived just in time for a nice dinner. It was awesome to be in a house again after so long on the road.

The next morning we had a nice breakfast of waffles and then drove to the NASA Space Center. We passed close to the city centre but did not stop. The museum was fairly interesting with a number of exhibits and movie theatres. The main attractions however were the tours. There is a large NASA research centre located near the museum which is accessed via little motorised trains. A recorded commentary is provided during the trip.

The first tour took us to a facility used for testing and training for the Space Shuttle. This building contained a fully wired, full scale cargo hold and cockpit and is considered to be a part of the shuttle fleet.

The second tour visited mission control which was in charge of many of the early space missions including the Apollo missions which got to the moon. We could only look through a viewing window but it was still great to see. A very enthusiastic worker gave a speech about what it would have been like during a mission. I found it incredible that the average age in Mission Control for the first Apollo mission was just 28. This is the Houston in "Houston, we have a problem" (which no one ever said by the way. The real phrase was "Houston, we've had a problem here").

Both tours stopped in at Rocket Park on the way back. This had a few small rocket parts and engines outside but the main attraction was the Saturn V rocket which was housed in a huge building. Saturn V is the rocket that took astronauts to the moon and is the tallest, largest, and most powerful rocket ever built. It holds the record for the highest payload taken in to orbit at 140 tonnes, more than four times what the Space Shuttle could carry. It's hard to describe just how immense this is and how amazing it is to look upon the only vehicle to ever have taken humans to another celestial body. I could have sat and stared at it for hours.

It was too large to capture in a single photo

Each engine was gigantic

The museum took up most of the day so we decided to stay somewhere nearby for the night. Galveston Island was a short trip away and we had booked a campsite in a state park. This was the first time we had seen the sea in over two weeks and it seemed like a significant milestone.

We spent much of the next day at the beach, lying in the hot sun and swimming in the warm water. Personally I thought that the beach was okay but nothing special. The water was a muddy brown colour, apparently due to run off from the Mississippi River.

After several hours on the beach it was time to move on towards New Orleans, our next destination. We took a free car ferry back to the mainland where we saw dolphins (or porpoises?).

The drive through the rest of Texas was flat but changed significantly once we reached Louisiana. The landscape became a lot wetter with rivers and swamps criss crossing the forest. The highways in many cases ran above water for dozens of miles at a time.

We arrived in New Orleans just after 11pm which I'll cover next time.