Week ending Jan 14, 2015 Lake Charles, Houston Space Center

Friday after chat with John's parent's we headed off to drive the Creole Nature Trail. Our first point of interest was the community of Cameron, home of the first oil wells drilled in Louisiana.  We then stopped in the Sabine National Wildlife refuse and walked the 1/2 mile Blue Goose Trail, and the the 1 1/2 mile Wetland Trail. Despite being promised a proliferation of birds wintering in the area, not much wildlife was found.  We then carried on to Holly Beach, on the Gulf Coast.  It had an interesting line of trailers in a park, all color coordinated.   

Unfortunately fog had rolled in we had no views of the gulf.  We decided that we would make our drive into a round trip so headed to Cameron.  Following trip took us to a ferry, which we discovered was free traveling from west to east (our direction of travel) but cost $1,00 if traveling East to West. We stopped at T-Boys restaurant  at Creole.  Our next stop was the three mile Pintail Wildlife drive,  with a 1/2 mile boardwalk trail. We thought we might walk the three mile loop, but found big signs prohibiting people from exiting their vehicles. We completed the boardwalk, again not a lot of unusual animals or birds.  However as we continued back on the driving loop, we saw numerous birds that we had never seen before, as well as a many of the more common ones

White Ibis

Roseate Spoonbill

Great Heron

Then we spotted an alligator basking in the sun on the side of the swamp.  It scurried into the water, and all we could see was it's nose.   We waited for a while to see if it would come back out, but no luck.   So we continued along.  Then we started seeing lots of alligators.  This is the first time we have ever seen alligators in the wild.

Alligator

We must have seen a dozen or so turtles, a real surprise since we hadn't seen any turtles at the Desert Turtle sanctuary we had visited in Arizona last year.

Turtles

This turned out to be one of the most fantastic wildlife locations we have seen on our trips since we retired.

Saturday morning dawned sunny after a tremendous thunderstorm with rain and some hail. We visited Sam Houston Jones State Park. We did a few short walks along the Calcasieu River,which is supposed to be a bit above flood level, but we didn't see any evidence of flooding. The park has numerous ponds which we discovered were amass with turtles basking on logs in the water.  After lunch overlooking a pond and watching several birds we headed back to the trailer.  Upon arrival at the trailer we noticed that one of our rear tires had picked up a nail and was going flat. We found a Firestone tire shop close by that was open until 7:00 P.M. on Saturday, so off we went. We were back to the trailer shortly after 6:00 P.M. with the tire plugged.

Sunday we spent the day watching football playoffs and curling.

Monday we went for a walk along the shore of Lake Charles at Bord du Lac park. This seems to be a  popular wintering spot for many birds such as snow geese and Muscovy ducks.

Muscovy Duck

We then drove through the historic downtown area.

Lake Charles Historic City Hall

Tuesday, after doing laundry, we went to Steamboat Bill's for lunch. It is a restaurant highly recommended by locals as the place to eat. The food was really good, Joan had a shrimp taco and John a grilled chicken po-boy. We agree, rating it among some of the best food we've had. After lunch we went back to the trailer to do a few chores in preparation for tomorrows move.

On Wednesday, we headed to the Space Center RV Park in League City, on the south side of Houston.  We chose this park, as it is close to the Houston Space Center.    The park is not bad for a city RV park, but does have the narrowest sites we have been in for a while, but our choice here is all about location.

We spent Thursday at the Johnson Space Center. We started our tour with a tram ride. It took us to the Command Center, from which the space missions were controlled. Today the command center looks exactly as it did in the early years of space travel as it has been designated a historic site and the original equipment was restored (ie. from the days before desktop computers). The command center that controls the present space missions is located one floor below the first one.

We then visited  the astronaut training facility which along with many simulated space stations, etc. has a Canadarm to allow prospective astronauts to get used to using the technology.

Canadarm

Finally, we stopped at Rocket Park, where a Saturn V, a three stage liquid fuel rocket used in the Apollo program for human exploration of the moon, and was later used to launch Skylab, the first American space station. The Saturn V was launched 13 times from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with no loss of crew or payload. The Saturn V remains the tallest, heaviest, and most powerful rocket ever brought to operational status and still holds records for the heaviest payload launched and largest payload capacity to low earth orbit.

Back in the Exhibit Plaza, we saw Chris Hadfield's crew pictures, along with all of the NASA crews.  

We went to the Blast-off Theater which gave updates on present day missions and the latest news about the Mars rover, Curiosity. Our final stop was the Space Center Theater, a film about the future of space travel.  It covered the development by private companies of new space ships which will be used to man the International Space Station after the USA's current agreement  with the Russian space agency to carry crew to the ISS expires in 2018.  It also covered the Orion program, which is developing space craft which will carry people to the moon again, to asteroids, and eventually (2030's) to Mars.  The trip to Mars is projected to take about 6 months, at which point it would take much longer to return, as its orbit takes Mars further away from Earth.  The closest point is not reached again for another 26 months, so the return to Earth would be about 3 years after the departure for Mars.  Needless to say, a lot of the effort goes into how people would be able to survive on Mars for that long without any timely communication (it would take a message between 4 to 20 minutes), or ability to get supplies from Earth.  One of the interesting things being developed is an inflatable living area with solar arrays, which would be deployed once the space craft got far enough from Earth, as the actual capsule (below) would not be viable living quarters for that long a trip for 4 to 6 people.

Orion