spring break

We thought we should do something for spring break this year- somewhere warmer and less rainy than Corvallis for a little break.

Houston sounded like the perfect McManus destination- not too far or expensive to fly to, and some great activities for the boys.

We stayed in the Museum District at a pretty fabulous boutique hotel called Hotel ZaZa.  Their shuttle cars had longhorn skulls on the front- which we took in the evenings for dinner.  You feel like a real Texan when you are driving around with a longhorn.

The first day we visited the Johnson Space Center.  They have a large museum with moon rocks, artifacts, and a Sky Lab mock up.  They also have a large play structure for the kids- not very space like but a good way to burn off kid energy.  The highlight is a tram tour inside of the Space Center.  We visited the astronaut training center which has mock ups of the ISS modules and a space shuttle which is sadly being dis-mantled.  We also saw a Saturn 5 rocket- what would have been Apollo 18, which didn't have the funding to be launched but was fully restored for display.  It was amazing to get to walk around it and really internalize the size of the rocket and the jets.  An Apollo engineer was our tour guide for that section.

That evening we drove to Galveston for dinner, and found a gulf front burger joint, where we got to watch the waves and the pelicans.  We walked on the gulf coast for a little while before returning to Houston.

The next morning we went to the Museum of Fine Art, and saw the touring King Tut exhibit.  We rented the audio tour so that Harrison Ford could talk us through the various displays.  It was very impressive, though we were a little disappointed that the big gold mask is no longer on tour (it's staying in Egypt).  We then went to the nearby Children's museum and the kids could have spent the rest of the week playing there- Owen loved a mini kid city and Ben liked the plumbing toys in the outside water area.  We took a brief break from the museum to swim in the hotel pool, but it had gotten too cold so we quickly gave up and returned to the kids museum.

Our final day we walked to the Houston Zoo.  Our timing was a little unfortunate, as that was the only day Houston had rain.  The good part about the rain was it emptied out the zoo.  Ben still really enjoyed all the animals and even was brave enough to feed lettuce to a giraffe.