Drove into Houston to see the Museum of Science and History.
This is a world-class museum with great dinosaur bones and fossils, Egyptian mummies and junk, spectacular gems and a terrific section about the oil industry. We got a zillion pictures here, too.

Went to the Johnson Space Center in League City. We took the $24 tour which was pretty neat. I really liked the Saturn 5 rocket they have laying sideways in one of their buildings. It is an awe-inspiring monster and I’ll wager riding one must have been a rush. We also got to go through the astronaut training building and Mission Control Center (think “Houston, we have a problem”). We got a ton of pix.

Drove back into Galveston again to visit the Moody House, the Bishop’s Palace and to try some food. Unfortunately, we crapped out on the Moody House because they only run tours every two hours and we would have had too long of a wait. We then went to the Bishop’s Palace which is an extraordinary architectural confection. The tours here are self-guided and they give you a little data doodad that gives the visitor the poop about each portion of the house.
We ate at a place called “Shrimp N Stuff” which was okay. It is supposed to be great food for this area but I’m afraid the locals must not be real discriminating diners because the food was okay but nothing special. Texas seem to thrive on mediocre food.

Drive from Columbus to League City, TX between Houston and Galveston. We arrived early so we had time to drive onto Galveston Island and back through Texas City.
Galveston has some beautiful houses but Texas City has none. Texas City seems to be an enormous refinery. We ate at a place called Nick’s on the Galveston Seawall but the food was just okay.

Stayed in camp again today to do the dreaded laundry. Machines were in use the first time we showed so we took a drive on Shaw’s Bend Road looking for animals but the weather had most of them hiding except some ugly black buzzards eating a nice dead roadside javelina.
I chatted a bit with the neighbor who told me that “Most folks think God created the earth but actually it was the East Texas Baptists who hired God as a figurehead.”

Loafed in camp all day.

Power crews left our park at about 10:15 this morning after wrasslin’ with the underground conductors all night. Much of our battery power and propane will require replenishment after a very cold night.
We drove around the area near our campground passing through Weimar and Columbus (again) taking some pix of the neat houses and churches.
I also popped over to the camp office and got the guy to fill one of my propane cylinders since it went empty after last night’s power outage which prevented electric heater use. Power went off again today. The utility trouble men are stumped about the cause.

We piled into Charlotte and took off on a trip to no specified destination. We went north, then east, then south and then west and, surprisingly, ended up where we started. The first town we encountered was Fayetteville, named for Fayetteville in the Carolinas but I can’t remember which one. It is a bustling metropolis of some 300 souls with the usual courthouse in the middle of a big square of businesses but instead of the courthouse being a big, imposing stone and brick structure, this Fayetteville courthouse was wood. There must be some unwritten law in these parts that all courthouses must have a big assembly of Seth Thomas clocks mounted such that they face all four directions from the steeple or cupola or whatever you call a structure on top of the building because, so far, there are courthouses with clocks at the top in La Grange, Columbus, Schulenburg and Fayetteville we have seen.. They are very nice, if not similar.
They can publish a tourist guide indicating that this area has numerous towns with merely two types of civic improvements; painted churches and courthouses with Seth Thomas clocks in their roof embellishments.
We left Fayetteville and went to Bellville which is actually in Austin county. Surprisingly, the city of Austin, TX is not in or even near Austin County.
Bellville is a nice little town with some 3000 folks but we did not see a courthouse with four Seth Thomas clocks nor any churches painted anything but white. Strangely, the courthouse in Bellville is a large, ugly, imposing structure of indescribable style that has been built directly in the middle of the road from Bellville to I-10 causing virtually the only traffic backup we encountered all day. Bellville is also home to an enormous bust of Steven Austin that is plopped down at the intersection of two minor highways. Austin must have been an ugly fucker or the sculptor intended to make a joke statue because Steve seems to have been given an enormous nose that appeared to be a cross between Pinocchio’s and Walter Matthau’s. The statue is made out of some type of yellow stone and gazes into a culvert.
The drive through the country around here is wonderful. The grass is emerald green, most of the farm houses are very nice, the town residences are mostly beautiful with Craftsman-type and late Victorian architecture and there is almost no traffic, even on weekdays. It is very scenic and it seems pretty clear why folks settled around here.
There does, however, seem to be one almost universal failing in these parts: Texans apparently believe foundations are extraneous and too expensive to build properly so quite a few of the structures we have seen have assumed a list to one side or another, including Fayetteville’s courthouse.
The power in our park took a hearty shit this evening and the park was full of workers digging and pulling feeders and playing with transformers and freezing because the overnight temperatures were in the low 30’s. We used a bunch of propane and ran the batteries low trying to keep the interior of the Invader warm.

Drove to see some more “Painted Churches” which, surprisingly, are painted albeit not too well on the outside. The first unit we saw was in an unmapped location in a town called Dubina, which means “oak grove” in Eastern European Bohunk or Czechoslovakian or Singlebrowvian.
The church was called Saint Bob’s or something and unscheduled tourists, like us, are apparently not allowed in because the building was locked. From my perspective, the outside looked just like a church with poor exterior painting.
From there we went to Ammannsville to see another church called Saint Somethingorrather’s which was not locked. It had much better exterior painting and, since it was unlocked, we could go in to admire the interior painting, as well. Not only was the interior painting, including detail work, quite nice but the windows and interior religious doodads were spiffy as well. Peg got pix of everything, I think.
Then we drove back over to La Grange to get a look at the inside of the courthouse which we could not access the last time we were there. It is pretty neat with lots of architectural stuff to make it interesting. Handrail assemblies at the stairs, the atrium concept and the interior fountain are spiffy and the transom doors are beautiful.
Peg then drove us into Columbus for another lookabout. We also got some ice cream at a place called “Dairy Cone” which also seemed to be surrounded by funny-looking neighbors. One guy was strolling around with the crotch of his pants directly between his knees and another guy had a do that made his head look like an elongated cylinder. Very weird.
On the way back to the Invader we wandered around on some country roads and only saw about 125 deer.

Crappy weather all day – cold, rain, no sun until about 10 minutes prior to sunset. We hunkered down in the trailer and watched movies and Top Gear reruns all day.