Cruising the Western Caribbean - Day 2 & 3

April 6 & 7, 2015
For Spring break my family and I went cruising on the Navigator of the Seas.  We had two days sea and really didn't do much.  It was sooo relaxing.  I loved the fact that we had no telephone or internet connections.  It really made me feel like we were on a vacation and my spouse was able to unwind.  We did take advantage of the ships spa area and pampered ourselves with hot stone massages.

I didn't take a lot of pictures.

The most exciting thing was seeing another ship passing us or I should say we passed it.  For the most part we didn't see anything but blue blue water and blue skies.

 The sunsets were exquisite to watch and I did enjoy doing that.

 The main thing we did do was explore the ship and took advantage of all its amenities.

 Needless to say the food and drink was fabulous.  We did spend one meal as the sushi restaurant.  While there I had to get a Kirin Light beer.  My nieces name is Kirin and I thought that was a good play on words since Kirin means light, in either Gaelic or Japanese - I can't remember which one it is.  I also did it in memory of my brother, her father, who has since passed on in this world but is never forgotten. His birthday used to be today- the seventh. I had to toast it with something he would have wanted to drink.

Cruising the Western Caribbean - Day 1; 4-5-2015

My family loves to go on Cruises and it had been awhile since we had gone on one as a family.  So for Spring Break this year we decided to go ahead and go on one.  This time we choose Royal Caribbean - Navigator of the Seas.   We decided to go on this cruise mainly because of the times it was available and also it left out of Galveston, Texas.  Galveston is so much easier for us to get to since its a day drive to there, unlike the ships that leave out of  Florida.  We are leery of flying to Florida because once before our plane was delayed and we missed the ship and over half the cruise. The cruise line put us up at a resort hotel at our next port of call but it just wasn't the same as being on the ship.   Now if we can drive we much rather do that.

These are the images that were taken that first day as we left Galveston.
The ship pushes itself away from the dock by using its thrusters.  Its such an unusual feeling having the ship go sideways.  When it gets to the middle of the channel it then starts to move forward.

This looking towards the back of the ship.

 Looking at the cruise terminal you can see all sorts of birds in the water.  The thrusters stir up the waters and it obviously brings food to the birds for they to be so concentrated in this area.

 I thought it was so neat to be able to look down and see the birds flying below us.  It's not often you can watch the top of a bird as it is flying.

 The Navigator of the Seas wasn't the only cruise ship making this voyage.  Here's a Carnival cruise ship doing basically the same trip.  We had traveled with Carnival before but the kids didn't like it as much as they do Royal Caribbean.

 This is part of the pier shopping area.  I've been to it before and have enjoyed it.  The sailing ship to the right is  the 1877 Iron Barque 'ELISSA',  and I've been on it before.  2011/09/beautiful-flowers-other-things-around

Going past it and looking back at it.

This is the Ocean Star Oil rig.  I've been here before and written about it as being one of my favorite places to visit./2011/09/ocean-star-offshore-rig-museum-galeston  I wished I could have visited it again but time did not allow it.  At least I got to take pictures of it from a different angle.

Here's another view of it.

It was interesting to see this tug boat hard at work pulling this barge away from the pier.

It was a pretty overcast day and we did have rain as we were driving down so I was not able to get some good picture of Galveston. 

I did like this showing the channel marker and also the coastline of the city.

This was looking back up the channel towards Houston.

The birds around there were magnificent.  It was so much fun watching them fly all around us.  What really amazed me was the size of some of the sea gulls.  

This was not a sea gull but a brown pelican.  Galveston always seem to have a lot of pelicans hanging out by the waters edges.

Another brown pelican flying.

The rest of the day and for the next couple of days we just took it easy since we were at sea for 3 days.

Quick road trip to Austin Texas and see a great outcrop of the Austin Chalk

I had to do a quick road trip to Austin.  While getting to the place we wanted to get to we got lost.  We stopped and a local gave us directions to get there.  We found it to be faster than the way we've gone in the past and decided to take the same way back home.  While we were headed back I just couldn't get over the outcrops that were there and drooled over them.  I wished I had more time to stop and get out and see them.    This is obviously a new road and hasn't been weathered much.
The road was North Capital of Texas - 360 Hwy. I was headed north at the time.

I will try to update this post more on the geology when I have a little bit more time to do some research on it.  I do feel like I can comfortably say some of it is the Austin Chalk. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the Austin Chalk:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Chalk.  Which to me wasn't much.


Now I want to go back again.

Visiting NASA Space Center - Houston TX

We went to Houston to visit family at Thanksgiving time.  On the Friday after, my family decided to go to see the Space Center at NASA before we headed back home.
Here are my images of that trip.
One of my favorite images of the trip.  Its so impressive to be able to see one of the space shuttles like that.

 Here's a image of Houston as we were driving to the Space Center.

 And here's an image of Houston at night from the hotel window we were staying at.

NASA SPACE CENTER - HOUSTON TEXAS

 As soon as we parked at the Space Center my family was out looking at the things that were on exhibit out side.  Here they actually had the Space Shuttle Independence.  To me nothing gets better than that - being able to actually walk around it and see it from different angles.

The Space Shuttle 'Independence' at the NASA Space Center Houston TX

 Through the years my family has been to the Space Center, but its not very often that we get to go there.  One of the things I love about the place is that it is always evolving and changing so its never really the same.
We walk in and its a huge place and it is overwhelming.  They do give you a guide and do make suggestions of where you should go and tell you what time you can here key people talk.

 This was the typical stuff I expected to see.

 What I wasn't expecting to see was their special Leonardo DaVinci - Machines in Motion exhibit.  Needless to say it was a fascinating exhibit and I spent a lot of time looking at everything.

 Everything that was there was based on his notebooks and are believed to be things he may have actually built.  They tried to replicate things as closely as possible.
I had never realized he had invented a bicycle.

 

With each piece they had a display like this one explaining things, along with the diagram it was based on.

 They also had a video going which was showing some of his more popular sketches.
These two images where  taken while it was playing - I really didn't thing they would turn out.

 What was really nice about a lot of these exhibits was they were hands on and you could touch and move things.

There was so much to see and do.  I just wished I had written down the stuff I was seeing.  Some of these are obvious like this log cutter but others aren't.

 Like this one.  I can't remember what this was.

 or this but it did look like a clock or something complex like that.

 This was a drill press of some sort.

 And I think this was a tank.

  While this was a flying machine.

 Along with these others, and also a parachute. (Some of the pictures I took were too out of focus or not getting it at a good angle for me.

 I thought this was interesting a machine gun before its time.

 So many machines - such a genious. It was a great exhibit to see and I was glad it was showing when we went there.

     Then we looked at more of the mainstream exhibits.  They were good too but not as impressive as the DaVinci exhibit.

  With Columbia I was always curious as to what when wrong.  At least with the displays like these I could see where some of the problems were.

 Then they had and exhibit for Apollo that I just had to check out.  I was able to go into a vaulted room and see these treasures.  MOON ROCKS!!  to me these were by far the best exhibit they had and a spent many a minute looking at them.  In fact I was spending so much time my family went ahead to other areas without me and told me to meet up with them at noon in the cafe.  I guess they weren't going to be able to pull me away from these very easily.

 I liked seeing the rover and equipment they used for gathering the samples too.

 and the replicated moon scape.

 I had recently saw the movie 'Gravity' and after being here and reading about how dangerous everything was - jut made me appreciate the movie all the more.  Especially when you see how tiny most of it is and how little room there truly is to do things.

 After we were done we left the town going by the port of Houston.  I sometimes forget that Houston has a port and that is why it became such a big city because of all the stuff that is done in association with the port.

 And here's another view of the main shipping channel.

It was a good trip and it was well worth the time and effort to go see the  NASA Space Center.  After seeing it - It makes you proud to be an American and to know that our citizens were the ones to put the first man on the moon.