April 20: Houston, TX to New Orleans, LA

This morning I woke up at 6:45a to go running-in a gym!! Our Super 8 motel was the first place we stayed at that had a gym!! This place also had the best free Breakfast, with hot sausages and biscuits in addition to the usual cereal and bagels staple. This is also where I learned that volcanoes had recently erupted in Iceland, and due to all the ash in the air, all flights between Europe and the US have been cancelled. We actually met two girls from England who had been vacationing in Costa Rica, and their tour group had originally been scheduled to fly from Costa Rica to Houston, then out of Houston back to England. They were stuck in Houston! At least they had gotten stuck there, versus somewhere in the middle of nowhere...

We got to Lyndon B Johnson Space Center and took the 90min tram ride around the center. First stop was the ACTUAL Mission Control Green room from way back in the 1960's--ALL the Apollo missions--yes, the famous 11 and 13--(and 6 Gemini missions, and some others I don't remember) had been controlled from that very room!! Even more exciting was that the current, active space control and monitoring was being conducted in the identical Brown room right below us! Interesting facts:
They had put people on the moon without calculators (they used slide rules)
First and last word transmitted thru space was "Houston"


During the tram tour we also saw the Simulation training center where they still train astronauts to this day! At the Rocket park we saw what had been about to be Apollo XVIII, Saturn V, the space shuttle that had been all set to go to space, but the program hadn't had enough money left to put it into space.


After the ride, we walked around the main tourist attraction building. There was an exhibit where we got to lay on a bed of nails! They had a childrens playground that Alfred wanted to play in and a flight simulator-but it cost $4, so we decided not to go in it. I bought a t-shirt in the souvenir shop, and almost bought a pen that the astronauts used in space. This pen can write underwater, over grease, in a vacuum without gravity, etc!! Cost $24 so didn't buy it.


We had to get going to New Orleans, so didnt hang around for too long. We went to Whataburger for lunch since we had been seeing a whole ton of these fast food burger shops since arriving in TX. Burgers tasted like McDonalds, but their giant-sized "medium"-sized drinks were memorable. When filling the cups from the soda fountain, I initially grabbed the 'large' lid, and realized-with not a small amount of surprise-that the 'large' lid was TOO BIG for our monstrous cups! They have ones even bigger!?!?


On the road to New Orleans: Rest stop in Louisiana: had a casino attached to it!


You really know you're in Louisiana when you see the swamps!



Dinner at The Chimes in Baton Rouge:

Appetizers: Blackened Alligator (yes, we all had some alligator for dinner), Boudin Balls (sausage mixed with rice rolled into a ball and deep-fried), 35cent oysters (normally I don't like oysters, but these weren't bad! Makes me neutral about oysters now) and the waitress mixed the sauce from scratch right in front of us! Their hot wings were good as well. It's hard to find good original flavored hot wings these days.




Main course: Alfred had Lousiana-style BBQ shrimp, Jimmy had Catfish Poboy, and I had Crawfish Poboy. Crawfish is GOOD!



Drinks: Jimmy was amazed at the prices of beer here. A large pint of beer only cost $3.25!! We convinced Alfred to get the El Diablo (fruit-infused Don Julio Tequila). He hated it, but I liked it, so I drank it for him :) . However, it didn't really taste like tequila...more like a mixed drink of cranberries and pineapple.


VERY reasonably priced place! For all the food and drinks, it only came sown to about $25 a person.

We arrived in New Orleans around 9:30p, checked into our motel (Super 8!), and took a cab to Bourbon St. Our cabbie was pretty awesome. When he found out that this was our first time in New Orleans, he gave us a map, told us where the good night-life was outside of Bourbon St., and and chatted about L.A. (I guess he was originally from there). However, he then started to talk about God and miracles.....

Bourbon St: for a Tuesday night of a regular working week (NOT holidays, NOT summer, etc.) the street was packed with people! The nightclubs and bars were in full swing! Most of the places were bars with different themes, such as the "Huge Ass Beers" bar that earned an, "ALL RIGHT!" from Jimmy. Of course, Jimmy had to get a "Huge Ass Beer." We had read about Big Al who played at Funky Pirates on the internet, so we specifically looked for that bar. Good thing, too, cuz with all the millions of bars on that street, it woulda been impossible for us to decide which to go into. Turns out, Big Al was pretty awesome! Good music, good alcohol, pretty waitress who I told Jimmy to hit on, but he didn't.



Forgot to mention, one of the strip clubs we passed had a live girl on display in their glass-less window displays. She was an African American woman, sticking her thong-only bottom out the window, clenching her butt-cheeks individually along with the rhythm of the song that was playing in the club...