Don’t Mess With Texas.
Greetings from Beaumont, TX!
- Day Before Yesterday: Tucson, AZ to Van Horn, TX
- Yesterday: Van Horn, TX to San Antonio, TX
- Today: San Antonio, TX to Beaumont, TX by way of Houston, TX.
I visited Johnson Space Center today… well… to be technical, I visited “Space Center Houston”, which includes a tram tour of 3 desperately static places within Johnson Space Center. …in Houston.
Yes, it took me three days to get here from Tucson, AZ. Having traversed Texas I have a few observations I’d like to share:
- Most of Texas (as far as I can tell) is vacant.
- The radio landscape in Texas is (for me) mostly unbearable, consisting primarily of:
- Spanish language oom-pah music
- Christian broadcasting
- Country music
- Limbaugh-esque far-right ranting
- Most of non-vacant Texas seems to be populated with towns like Van Horn (barely a wide spot in the road), that make Winslow, AZ look like LA.
- There seems to be a general assumption that everyone is a Christian.
- “Don’t mess with Texas” is, apparently, not just a cute tourist-baIting slogan, like “I love New York”… it’s more of a … not-so-subtle “f*ck you” to the rest of the country.
- Most people I’ve encountered here think Rhode Island is part of New York. It’s not.
- What’s with the flies? About a hundred miles on either side of Van Horn, on I-10, there’s swarms of aggressively stupid flies. As I was bringing my stuff into the hotel room, I ended up letting 5 of these stupid things into my room. Once they were in, they wouldn’t leave, and wouldn’t leave me alone.
Considering it’s taken me 3 days to traverse Texas, I have to admit I’m pretty disappointed. I mean JSC was OK… but…the post-9/11 paranoia is getting old. Bag checks, metal detectors and so on… I mean… come on. The tram tour take you to 3 places: The retired Apollo-era Mission Control Center (which was pretty cool, but, since it’s retired, you’d think they could let us go down and actually check out the consoles and junk), the Space Vehicle Mock-up Facility (where nothing of note was happening, and there was lots of cool stuff in view that was unmentioned by the pre-recorded descriptions), and the Rocket Park (where we were only allowed 10 minutes to check out all the stuff… which was a gyp.)
Don’t get me wrong… I’m glad I went to JSC… but… traversing 800 miles of mostly-barren Texas countryside, listening to ranting preachers and raving fascists to get to it made it a little anti-climactic.
There’s good exhibits, and some good information that, it seems, is unavailable elsewhere (astronaut interviews, artifacts, trivial tidbis…)
I dunno… I suppose if I was already in Houston for some other reason, and I had a day to kill, and I’d never been there before, I’d take a day to check it out. If I had driven 800 miles to get to it, and had seen it before… looking for more insight… it might not be all I’d hoped.
Welp… it’s off to New Orleans… let’s see what’s happening there.