Today we got to travel back into Houston to visit one of our favorite museums – The Houston Museum of Natural Sciences. We started by driving down a remarkably congestion-free I-45 into the city which is about an hour south of where we are staying at Lake Conroe. Texas freeways are very circuitous with big parallel frontage roads such that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the freeway from the frontage. We were fortunate and got on the freeway on the first try.
We finally arrived in the neighborhood where the Museum is located and drove around the block a bit before noticing there was a parking structure for Museum patrons that cost $5 to park for the day. It was only when we got closer to the parking structure entrance that we noted the sign stated the $5 parking was only for Museum members and mere peons have to cough up $20. We went in anyway. The clearance was barely adequate for us to drive our F-250 inside and we brushed the antenna on many of the concrete support beams inside but, fortunately, no roof scraping was encountered.
We took the elevator down 5 floors and entered the Museum at a cost of $25 a head. The Museum is magnificent. They have a giant section with dinosaur skeletons, a spectacular mineral and gem hall, a big section of Egyptian antiquities, a section about Texas mapmaking, a great exhibit with operating model trains, a big display of seashells, another section with ammonites (big colorful prehistoric sea snails) and trilobites, a Foucault pendulum, extensive displays of dead, stuffed Texas wildlife, another section with stuffed African wildlife, a large display of Early American History, an entire hall donated to Amazon rain forest and a nifty museum store. My feet crapped out before we could see it all but we did a pretty good job.
On the way home, I-45 was not the tranquil highway we traveled down on the way into the city. To make things worse, I blooped the navigation and we explored a bit of I-10 that we did not intend to see. Ultimately we made it back to Lake Conroe and I made some curry for Peggy to make up for my lousy navigation.
We had another one of the gorgeous Texas sunsets today.
We took a few pix at the museum and you can see some of them if you click here