We headed toward Houston when we finally heard back from the social security office in Minnesota. She was actually just calling for an update. Chris informed her about the arrival of his green card and she said he needed to physically show it to a member of staff at a social security office, but that it didn’t matter which one. They could update his status and get things moving. Unfortunately the nearest one by quite a bit was in a suburb of Houston. Houston is a hugely big city. It must have had at least 150 people waiting around, possibly more. We decided to save it, but unfortunately, we were on the cusp of a major holiday weekend. Labor Day in the US is considered the official end of summer in terms of people going on their last holidays for the year and most schools and universities will resume after that if they hadn’t already. It was a Thursday, which meant we only had one more day before this big holiday. We decided to leave it till after Labor Day and just had lunch. We tried a famous Texas chain called Whataburger. It wasn’t bad.
Next we checked out an old art installation and a new park in east Houston. We found the art on a site called roadsideamerica.com. Smithers Park just happened to be next to it. It was quite impressive though:
The Orange Show had existed for quite a while and was very odd:
There was no one there, so we couldn’t ask anything about it and ventured on into downtown Houston, which was also on the artsy and attractive side:
Texas is known for having lots of weird and wonderful roadside attractions, so we checked out one more before leaving Houston. This was the Beer Can House:
This one was staffed. It turned out it was maintained by the same people who keep up the Orange Show. He was a university student who worked as a docent or something similar. He quite liked living in Houston and recommended us a few areas.
We carried on out of the city to our hotel. Houston was so big that even this took quite a while. Something of note on the way out was the plethora of hurricane evacuation route signs. The stereotype of Texas is rolling tumble weeds and cactus, but Houston was as sticky and humid as the rest of the gulf south. From the look of climate maps and our experiences, I suspect this area still has weather much like that of Louisiana.
It started torrentially raining when we arrived at our hotel. We decided to unpack later and go for a swim. Hilariously they only opened the pool for us because they figured English people were probably used to swimming in the rain 🙂
After finally unpacking when the sky calmed down, we went out for a truly fantastic Mexican meal:
Here’s the video: