"Houston, we've had a problem"

Wednesday 19th April

Apologies if these posts are coming a bit thick and fast but from now, they should slow down a wee bit. It will also help that this one is probably the most boring one I will ever publish.

We had another early start in order to squeeze in some free breakfast before having to depart for our bus. The early morning made it a pleasant 15 minute walk to the bus station but we were still swearing profusely by the time we made it. We only had about 10 minutes to wait before we boarded our bus and when we were checked in, we noticed there was already a pretty hefty queue for the 8:00 to Houston. We still managed to get a seat together. Not that it mattered, as I spent the entire 3 hour ride reading and Charlotte spent it sleeping. Whereas there was normally at least a few other tourists on the buses and trains we'd taken, this one consisted entirely of rather odd locals. One just casually asked the lady behind us if she had any food on her and another was either smoking in their seat or in the toilet, despite it being illegal. We were glad to be off once we arrived however, our 30 minute walk to our hostel didn't exactly take us through the nicest areas of the city. We passed plenty of homeless people and more than a few shifty looking characters but weren't bothered by any of them. We arrived at our hostel at just gone 12 but couldn't check in. We poured ourselves a coffee and sat down in the dining room to decide what to do with our day. We only had the one night and seeing as half the day was gone, we were severely restricted with what we could do. One option was to get a combination of buses out to the international space centre, which would take us almost 2 hours. After some consideration we ruled it out as paying $30 entry fee each plus return bus fare to only be there for a couple of hours just didn't seem worth it. We read a few things online that said plan to spend a whole day there and get there early, so we left it. Another option was to pick up a couple of basketball tickets for the evenings game between Houston Rockets and Oklahoma City Thunder. We'd looked online the day before and the cheapest tickets they had were $59 a piece and a booking fee on top. We were only still considering it because we could actually walk to the stadiums box office and end up not paying the booking fees. It was our plan to do that, so we started walking in to town. It was an incredibly hot and humid day and we worked up a sweat on the way in. By the time we got downtown, we'd changed our minds on the basketball tickets. We just couldn't justify spending $120 on a single game, when a regular season game (this would have been an end of season playoff game) would have cost us as little as $15. Instead we decided to just have a look around town, see if we could pick up a pin badge and then head back to the hostel to relax and cook ourselves a healthy dinner. Even that wasn't simple. The downtown area was similar to that of LA, there was absolutely nothing to see or do of any interest. It was pretty much just a business district with very few shops. We hunted down the visitor centre, which took us a fair while, as it was tucked away in the convention centre, that was currently hosting the robotics world championships (yeah, we didn't fancy that, even though it was free!). In keeping with how things were going, the visitor centre was pretty underwhelming too, just being a small kiosk that you would have struggled to find if you weren't really looking hard enough. We picked up a map and headed for a point on it that said “shops”. Despite the map, we still struggled to find the shops, as they were all tucked away inside a mall that, from the outside, you would have never known was a mall. We were starting to despise Houston. We picked up a sandwich each from Subway, as we'd missed lunch and couldn't find anything local to eat. On the way out of the mall, we chanced upon a gift and novelty shop and had a look in. We'd ruled out getting a pin badge for Houston, as we weren't sure there would be a souvenir shop anywhere. There were none in the shop that we could see either but tried our luck when the lady behind the counter asked if there was anything specific we were looking for. We were taken aback when she said she did have pin badges (for some reason she had them behind the counter) and we felt spoiled when she asked if we wanted ones that said Texas or Houston on them. We'd already got our Texas one from San Antonio, so just picked up a Houston one to add to the collection. Despite the success of the pin badge, we were fed up with Houston, so headed back to the hostel to check in. We passed more of the interesting characters on the way back, one of which tried to speak to us but we just kept on moving, ignored them and they carried on their merry way. After checking in, we paid a visit to a nearby supermarket for dinner and lunch and then returned to the hostel to sit out our time in Houston in peace. Thanks to all the constant travelling, we hadn't been eating great since we arrived in the states, so we went for a nice healthy dinner of fresh veg and rice.

“Gold Coast slave ship bound for cotton fields, sold in the market…”

James and Charlotte