Everything's bigger in Texas, part II

Welcome to the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC). It was renamed in honor of the late 36th U.S. President and Texas native, Lyndon B. Johnson. This is where astronauts are trained and it is home to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Manned Spacecraft Center. Also from sheer dumb luck we came here in the month that they let teachers in for free. Who would have guessed amazing space with no charge!

When Mike was reading up on what to do and see at the space center the number one thing was make sure you get out and do the tram as soon as you get there. Luckily we showed up just as they opened and got on the first tram so there was no wait for us. When we got back from our 90-minute trip it was clearly a more than two-hour wait.

The only way you can see anything of the actual functional portion of the Space Center is to take the tram tour. On your way out you pass this large mural depicting the Saturn V rocket. It's not until the end of the tour that you actually get to see it.

This unassuming building is where NASA's Orion project is underway. If this isn't a NASA program that you're familiar with, let me tell you a bit about it because it's very exciting. If you were devastated when they shut down the space shuttle program or if you were simply amazed by the movie The Martian, this is NASA's real life program that you should be familiar with. Orion is a pod that will carry astronauts into deep space. What's in deep space you ask? Well this pod will eventually take astronauts to an asteroid and eventually Mars. The NASA website gives the following information about the program: "NASA is developing a huge rocket called the Space Launch System, or SLS. This rocket is a heavy-lift launch vehicle. Orion will launch on top of this rocket. The heavy-lift launch vehicle will carry Orion beyond low Earth orbit, where the International Space Station orbits, and far past the moon." Is this amazing or what!

In this building NASA manages flight control for the human space portion of NASA's programs.

Unfortunately we visited on a Sunday so the entire command center was quiet. This is not to say that no one was working at the building. If you could look through the wall to the right of this photograph you would see the command center that monitors the International Space Station 24 hours a day. They are responsible for "flying" the International Space Station and responding to the needs of astronauts who are on board.

Back on the tram I was transfixed by these enormous canisters of liquid nitrogen. I mean I had never seen so much liquid nitrogen in all my life and I couldn't imagine what they were using it all for. Luckily the tram operator read my mind and told us about it. They use the liquid nitrogen to cool rooms in this building down to about 5 Kelvin which is about -450.67 °F. In this way the astronauts are able to acclimatize themselves to conditions in the void of space. One astronaut said that they had imagined what it would be like, and after they went through this training they realized that the coldest they thought anything could get was only about half as cold as space.

Most of the buildings on this campus are unassuming but this is the only building that I had ever seen before I got here. I don't know if you're a fan of Andrew Zimmern, who does Bizarre Foods and has one of only three jobs that I think are better than mine, but he filmed one of his shows here. That unassuming gray building is where they create astronaut food. I can't even tell you how much I would kill to be able to give input on that.

Now this building is my favorite stop on the entire tour. Pictures just can't do this building justice, so I have enclosed two videos to show you what I saw.

When I taught 8th grade we did a fairly solid section on the International Space Station. So when I looked at these mockups of sections of the International Space Station they were so familiar to me.

Unfortunately there's no one training in my videos because if you remember we were here on a Sunday and since NASA is a government operation very few people work on Sundays. It would have been really cool to see some of these items in use, but I'm just lucky we got to see them at all.

The very last stop on the tour brings you to an area where you can see full-size rocket and rocket engines up close. These are F1 engines and they're going to be used to propel the rocket that you're going to see inside the building.

This is a Mercury-Redstone rocket designed for NASA's Project Mercury. Al Shepherd would have taken a rocket very much like this to the moon in 1961. This type of rocket was used to launch the first and second Americans into space.

Here is the largest of those F1 rocket engines again. I think it does them more Justice when you see them in relation to a human being.

Inside the Saturn V building, NASA put together a very educational display detailing all of the Apollo missions. I was familiar with a couple of them but certainly didn't know details about them all.

This video shows you the Saturn V rocket. I made the video so that people would be able to grasp just how much fuel it takes to get one tiny pod into space. This rocket has a three-stage expendable liquid fuel systen and was initially developed to support the Apollo programs. Later it was also used to launch Skylab, Americas first space station, into orbit.

Do you remember a photograph of us at the beginning of the blog? Well right now we are seated inside the space shuttle in that photograph. As soon as we got off the tour, the first thing I wanted to do was come and see the exhibit that shows you how they flew the shuttle craft around the US. Before this piggyback system was developed, NASA used to ship the shuttle craft on a large barge out of Cape Canaveral, through the Panama Canal and back up to Johnson Space Center at a ruinous cost of multiple millions of dollars for each trip. Unfortunately the shuttle craft pictured here is a full scale model but the plane beneath it is the Real McCoy.

So let's focus on the plane for a moment. It is officially called the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, and there are actually two of them. They are extensively modified Boeing 747 airliners that NASA purchased and used to transport Space Shuttle orbiters. It really was a genius plan that saved the space program millions of dollars and transport costs. If the problem of getting the shuttle around from Florida to Texas were not solved, I'm not sure how long they would have been in use.

Now we're inside the 747 and here's something that I never considered before; they had to re-weight the plane with pig iron so that when it has the shuttle craft on its back it can still fly flat. For the most part they stripped everything that wasn't essential out of the inside to lighten the load. If you look in the foreground on the left side of the photograph you notice that there are a few first class seats left. This is there so that, if there are passengers flying with the shuttle craft, they have somewhere to sit. The seats are pretty much the only things left over to show it used to be a normal 747 when it started.

After touring the airplanes outside we came in to see the rest of the museum. I know it might seem silly but there's only 8 places in the world that you can touch a moon rock. If you've noticed from previous blogs, Mike and I are keen to collect experiences and I've done three of these now. Johnson Space Center in Houston, the Air and Space museum in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. The ones that are missing are MacMillan Space Center Canada, Kennedy Space Center in Florida, California Academy of Science in San Francisco, Air Zoo in Kalamazoo Michigan (this one's a heartbreak because we were in Kalamazoo Michigan!) and Clark Planetarium in Utah.

Close to where you can actually touch the moon rock, there was a case of moon "dirt". One of my friends collects sand samples from all over the world. I will have brought him about 50 by the time we get home, but unfortunately I think moon sand is off the list.

In another section of the museum they did a lovely diorama about how moon vehicles drive on the surface. It was amazing to stand there and pretend that you are actually seeing this scene in real life.

Later on in the museum I found an even cooler touchstone. This one is a piece of Mars! I have a very short bucket list of crazy items that I have to do before I die. On that list is getting into outer space. That one I think is achievable; but being able to touch Mars in the flesh is probably too far in the future. We spent about 6 hours touring around at the space center, and I think we did a good job seeing pretty much everything. After that it was time to go out and find somewhere to spend the night.

Mike and I both studied Google maps and found that there was a national wildlife refuge nearby. I really wanted to be outdoors to sit out and read for a bit, so we headed for what we thought was going to be a small side road. Unfortunately it was a day-use only area! This was a pretty big disappointment at first, but...

then we found this spot! I got to spend almost two hours reading my brand new book , The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom. This book was another gift from my Aunt Mary and she made a very good choice.

The next day, in my email inbox, we got a note from our geocaching app that they were doing a special event. If you could collect 500 points in 14 days, you would get a special planetary badge. Again this goes back to Mike and me liking to collect odd things, but we thought what the heck let's go geocaching on our way to our next location. That's where we found this particular puzzle cache. Normally with a Geocache the idea is to find the hidden item; with this one the idea was not just to find the location but to then solve the puzzle.

With teamwork we worked it out, got the log and were able to sign our names. I left a really nice reply for the cache owners and they got back to us! I even saw later that they took a look at the website for quite a while. Sometimes I forget how much fun geocaching can be.

This was another Geocache that we did today. This tree was way off the main highway and is the largest living oak in Texas. If it hadn't been for the Geocachers in this area we would never have seen this beautiful tree.

The last cache that we did was one called Cashezilla. Normally Geocaches range in size from under the size of a penny, up to about the size of an ammo canister. This is the largest one I've ever seen and I absolutely loved their twist. Do you see the keys in the foreground? You needed to scrabble through and find the one that undid the lock. This is right in front of someone's house so I can imagine the entertainment of watching people try to figure it out.

Even with all the geocaching, we got to Padre Island National Seashore in good time. We had looked up the park map online and decided to camp at North Beach which is a primitive campground.

I had no idea how cool this camp spot was going to be. I've done very little beach camping and I've certainly never been anywhere where we could drive our car out and have a 100% private area with no neighbors. Oh and you can't beat the price… it's free! The only thing you have to do is fill out a permit.

After we got settled Mike went to work creating the fire pit. I was inside getting dinner ready so I didn't know what kind of a masterpiece it was going to turn out to be. Notice how he even dug a channel to vent the bottom of the fire.

You can't see it in the still photographs but the wind here is wicked. The only way to have a fire safely was to make something just like he did. We had our usual taco wraps followed by S'mores for dessert.

This is my very first fire and camping on the beach experience. The night was beautiful with a partially full moon, and in the morning when we got up there were raccoon and Coyote prints all over the campsite. Good thing we didn't leave anything outside for them to munch on.

In the morning this was my view while I went back to reading my book. It took a bit of prodding by Mike to unseat me and get us moving towards our next destination. I'm serious; I could have sat here and read for three days! Too bad it's so far from home, If it were closer we would be here so many weekends out of the year.

In the parking lot we saw these beautiful Elegant Tern, Thalasseus elegans. We spotted them while we were working on our Junior Ranger badges. Don't laugh...Junior Ranger isn't just for kids, and the reason we wanted to do it here is because they didn't sell any Christmas ornaments and they had a beautiful limited edition ranger badge for the 50th anniversary of their turtle program. One of the things that I was most impressed about with the National Park Service junior ranger program is that they give every family a trash bag and ask them to pick up beach trash. When we went out to accomplish this task we noticed that the beaches were extremely clean. What a great way to teach kids about how dumping waste in the ocean only dumps it back on the shore.

After we left the Padre Islands we headed to San Antonio. If you look at San Antonio on Google Maps you're going to notice that, other than small parks inside the city, there's really no green space in the area. Luckily we spotted Choke Canyon State Park. On our way into the State Park however, we wondered if we'd made a terrible mistake.... For miles around there was nothing but oil and gas drilling, trailers for rent at under a $100 a week, and the most limited biodiversity I've seen in a long time. Mike and I thought perhaps we shouldn't even bother going in, but I really wanted to have a fire so we forged ahead. As you can see from the photo above, our camp spot ended up being lovely. The full RV spot meant we got to fill with water, plug in the RV for only the second time ever, and turn on the air conditioning for the first time. After we got there I was preparing dinner when Mike said "Drop everything, grab your camera and come out here". I know better than to argue, and here's what he brought me out to see…

These are Texas Leafcutter ants, Atta texana. I mean I've seen these guys on television a million times but there is nothing that can prepare you for seeing them work in reality. I hope that you enjoy this tiny view into their dedicated world. After you've seen the video, I also want you to keep in mind that they stripped two entire branches overnight. In the morning I was still fascinated by the ants but I have to say I felt a bit bad for the tree.

On the way in to San Antonio the skies opened and rain deluged down upon us. It was so bad that the national alert system pinged our phones to tell us about a flash flood warning. Not that we needed that warning, because the Texas highways had signs like this…

I said to Mike, "Do you really want to go to the open-air Alamo today? Why don't we find a library and plan our CDT journey?" It's good that we did because it took us over 6 hours to get everything put together. We booked our shuttle from Lordsburg, New Mexico to the Mexico border, figured out where to put the Beaver Lodge, and then spent an inordinate amount of time working out two things. How the heck are we going to get off the Continental Divide Trail, and where are we going to send all of our food boxes. This trail is not like the Appalachian Trail; it does not go near many towns, it does not put you near major highways... and it sure as heck does not butt up against any Greyhound lines. We were really at our wits' end when Mike spotted this one town. We overlooked it before because it was in an Indian reservation and I had said I don't want to leave the Beaver Lodge there. You have to remember that we've driven through a lot of Indian reservations, and we know that if anything happens to your property there you have to deal with the tribal council. But when Mike dug into it, he found out that there is a once-a-day bus from Chama, NM to Santa Fe, Santa Fe to El Paso, TX. This was our golden ticket! So once we'd nailed down all of these details, we decided to go back to a national monument we'd seen on our way to the library where we did all our research.

We made it at 4:30 with just enough time to see this area of the park. To my utter shame, I didn't know a whole lot about the Western mission culture.

I mean I knew that they were walled cities where native peoples came for protection and to learn about Christianity, but I had never seen one in person and certainly didn't understand the level of community that went on inside the walls.

I assumed that they would be much smaller! When we got here I thought that the central green was astoundingly beautiful and that it would have been an amazing place to live. Each native family was given a food ration in exchange for communal work and listening to the Word of God. Many of these missions were run by the Franciscans, so you can imagine that an education was also part of the deal.

Here is a close-up of the church. Amazingly it's still a working parish! I really wish we were going to be here for Easter; when you see the inside you'll know why.

You can see the beautiful red draperies that indicate the ending stages of Lent.

Here is a close-up shot of the altar. I was amazed by how intricate the carvings were and how much gold was inlaid. You can see why people were drawn to this beautifully decorated place when their normal lives were so drab.

Here is a close-up of the family dwellings that ran all around the outside of the walled city. The rounded item in the middle is a communal fireplace that would have been shared by several families. I'm really glad we made the time to come to this Mission, but we unfortunately missed the park movie so I guess we'll have to come back so that we can see more of it.

We only had two things planned in San Antonio. The first was to visit the Alamo, and the second was the riverwalk. I think it will help you to understand the rest of this section if you start out with an artist's rendition of the Battle of the Alamo, which took place from February 23, 1836 – March 6, 1836 in the early stages of the war for Texan independence from Mexico.

Here is the famous facade of the Alamo, which was originally a Spanish Mission Church from 1755-1793. What I didn't know before I got here was that the rounded top stone in the middle was actually added by the US Army long after the famous Battle of the Alamo when it was a supply depot.

Another thing that I think will help you understand why we came here is this letter that Lieutenant Colonel William Barret Travis wrote to help garner reinforcements for what would become one of the most famous seiges in Texas history. This is partially because his writing wad so moving, and partially because he did actually live up to his promises of victory or death.

The area behind the famous doors of the Alamo picture is actually quite bare. Remember, in its early years, the Alamo used to be a mission and this was the church, but so much of that area has disappeared because the Alamo has been so many things throughout history. Another funny thing about the town of San Antonio is that there were actually two battles here, though no one ever talks about the other one. Technically you're not allowed any photography inside the church and it was so packed with people that you wouldn't have been able to see anything anyway, but I thought that this chandelier was very beautiful and it served to show the craftsmanship that would have been present during its army depot years.

This is one last photograph from inside the church. Look at the "graffiti" that is done at the top of the pillar. It was put there during the US Army years of use, long after the Battle of the Alamo had concluded. The US Army made many changes. They put in a second floor and put the first permanent roof on the church.

There are only two formal memorials inside the Alamo. This one honors the 32 men from Gonzalez who answered the call from Travis' famous letter. They all perished at the battle, and the town of Gonzalez suffered the most heavy losses during this battle. Though I guess that goes without saying because everyone who fought at the battle was either killed in battle or executed. Historians disagree about the exact number, but it was between 182 and 257 Texians who died in the battle that lasted 90 minutes. Here is a quick summary of the battle: Following a 13-day siege of the Alamo by General, and President, Antonio López de Santa Anna, all Texians who participated were executed and burned, thus preventing a Christian burial. There was one exception to this but that's only because one Texian's brother served under Santa Anna. He begged to spare the body for a Christian burial, which was granted. I have to say, after being at Vicksburg and then reading this account, all I could think was all wars pit some brothers against brothers. Santa Anna clearly expected this to be the end of the Texians' rebellion, but his cruelty inspired many Texians to join the Army. Spurred on by a desire for revenge, the Texians defeated the Mexican Army on April 21, 1836 during the Battle of San Jacinto where they captured Santa Anna.

Remember I told you that there were two memorials inside the Alamo. This is the 103-year-old Japanese monument, in the Alamo's Convento Courtyard. It has this inscription on the back which states: "Stone from the native province of Suneemon Torii, The Bonham of Japan, in the province of Nagashino, The Alamo of Japan." It was created by a Japanese visitor, Shigetaka Shiga, who came to the Alamo in 1914. He was so moved by the sense of sacrifice that he created a poem, had it inscribed on Japanese granite, and installed at the Alamo. During World War II the monument was actually shot at and the Alamo considered removing it. Luckily it was decided that, because it was placed during a time of peaceful relations between our two nations, it should remain. The inscription on the front is in classic Japanese and is a poem written by Shigetaka Shiga. This was one of the last stops that we made in the Alamo. After this it was off to the riverwalk for us.

As you can see from this photo we didn't go to the typical portion of the San Antonio river walk. That was several miles up river from where we were. This area is the original beginning point of the famous riverwalk which has miraculously remained un-commercialized.

We simply took a stroll up and down the bank for about a mile. Of course we also managed to find a Geocache. Remember we're still working on our Planetary Badges. I might have let it go that we were geocaching along the river, but it led us to a very cool end to our visit in San Antonio.

While I was looking for good Geocaches to visit I spotted one that had 109 favorite points. That is practically unheard of! I mean most of them have a favorite score of zero or maybe one. I'm not sure if I've ever seen one that was over 100, but once we got there I knew why. This is the oldest VFW post in Texas. It is Post 76, and it was granted its Congressional Charter on June 26, 1917. They didn't always have the beautiful building that you see in this photograph but I think that this is their permanent home now. The story almost ended as quickly as it began, but after talking to a few of the members on the porch we met the post commander, Johnny Ornelaz.

Even though the post was closed when we arrived, he insisted on taking us in and showing us around. We spent a lovely half hour discussing how the post was haunted, along with much more inspiring stories about the men who had served. This is their memorial room. It has pictures of many people from Texas who served in all branches of the armed forces, as well as mementos that were given to this VFW Post.

Here is a picture of Johnny Ornelaz, discussing the mural that you can see to his left. It is a picture of about 300 men and women who served and died in the service of America, all of whom lived in San Antonio. He got quite choked up while talking about it and we felt very grateful to have heard his story.

Remember it was a Geocache that led us here, so we wanted to leave the token that we picked up from Cashzilla. When we left the Post we spent the next day driving across most of the State of Texas. Well I should say Mike spent the day driving across Texas and I spent the day packing our food boxes for the Continental Divide Trail. I really wish now that we had taken a picture of all 8 boxes together, but we didn't...

Sometimes on the trip you forget that the rest of the world has holidays that they're celebrating. We arrived in El Paso two days before Easter, and we witnessed this little girl wearing a bunny head that was practically as big as she is. I hope you all had a very happy Easter... I'm confident that this little girl did.