It’s not rocket science (Oh wait, yes it is…)

The Houston Space Centre is the location where most manned space missions were controlled. We took a tour of the Mission Control Centre that handled 10 Gemini, 10 Apollo and 21 Shuttle missions.

“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” and “Houston, we’ve had a problem” were received here. The configuration of the room is as it was for Apollo 11.

Also on the tour was rocket park where the main attraction was the HUGE Saturn V rocket that took men to the moon.

Time for lunch at the main building. It really had a space-like atmosphere. The food, thank God, wasn’t de-hydrated astronaut food.

After lunch we visited several more exhibits and presentations, including a shuttle mockup, a history of rockets and the various manned missions up to the present day.

Pepsi didn’t want to visit the space centre so she checked herself into the Tailwaggers Pet Resort for the day. When we picked her up in the afternoon and asked how her day was, she said “What happens at Tailwaggers, stays at Tailwaggers…”. She gave the owner a quick good-bye and dashed to the door.

It was time to go and get some more miles under our tires. We had picked up a Texas BBQ Trail brochure at the Welcome Centre and Luling, one of the towns on the trail, was on our route so we were excited to be able to have dinner there and look for a campground in the vicinity. Unfortunately, it was closed by 6:30PM as was most of the rest of the town with the exception of the Dairy Queen.

We decided to have Ruth’s delicious rice-tuna-pea salad for dinner at the Riverbed RV Park and Campground and called it an early night.

San Antonio was our main focus of the day.

We found a good shaded parking lot but decided to take Pepsi along for our tour of the city. This was definitely a problem for our Alamo visit. A very nice security guard, escorted Ruth and Pepsi off the park area premises and across the street. Martin had a brief visit but then we decided to do a quick walk around the city. An agent for one of the double decker tour bus companies told us that Pepsi was very welcome to take a bus tour with us and that’s exactly what we did.

We learned a lot about San Antonio, its Spanish heritage, the great number of German immigrants that moved into the area in the 1920s, the beautiful architecture and that it had been the capital of Texas before Austin. Unfortunately, the upper level of the bus was too hot and it wasn’t possible to take (good) pictures from the lower level.

After the tour we decided against a visit to the famous Mexican market but to do the riverwalk instead. A young architect created a plan of channeling the river with walkways on the left and right. Today there are beautiful bridges and great restaurants and bars on either side of the river. We saw a Bavarian biergarten serving Hofbräu beer and had lunch at the pet-friendly Lone Star Cafe.

After lunch we walked along the river some more.

Tired and thirsty we walked back to the van in 43C heat, gulped lots of water and then left for Junction, a small town about 200km northwest of San Antonio where we are staying at the Morgan Shady RV Park, right next to a river.