New Year's Vacation

After our Christmas celebrations with family, we still had a week before school starts back up.  We had been wanting to make a trip to Houston to check out a couple of museums.  Robert travels to Houston a few times a month for work, but I hadn't been in several years.

We left on Monday afternoon after the kids woke up from their afternoon naps, and we had a pretty uneventful drive.  We stopped for dinner at Spring Creek at Claire's request - she loves sausage - and then checked into our hotel.  We stayed at the Hilton Americas - it is a huge downtown hotel that is attached to the convention center, and they were running some great deals over the holidays.  The kids quickly settled in.


New Year's Eve Day, we headed to the Houston Museum of Natural Science to see some dinosaurs!  We'd heard that the museum could get busy, so we went to the Paleontology Hall first.  It was truly impressive.




Claire asked to take some photos, so here are a few parts of the exhibit from her perspective.  The photo on the upper right is of preserved triceratops skin - so cool.


We spent a lot of time in the Paleontology Hall and quickly went through several other exhibits before we needed to leave for lunch.  When we were buying tickets, we realized that the cost of a membership wasn't much more than for one day, so we bought the membership.  I'm glad we did - we will be back this summer.

After lunch, we returned to the hotel to rest (we each got a nap!) and then walked across the street to Discovery Green, a downtown park (on the right side of the photo below, you can see our hotel in the background).  The kids got scooters from Grandmommy and Granddaddy Martin, and we brought them with us.  Will was more interested in the playground, but Claire scooted all over the park.  We all had a good time!


We had two great meals that day.  Lunch was at Irma's - delicious Tex Mex.  No menus - they just come to the table and ask you what you want.  Dinner was at Houston's.  We frequently visited the Dallas location when we went there, and their seared tuna salad is one of the meals I miss the most.


On New Year's Day, we checked out of our hotel and drove south to Space Center Houston before heading back to San Antonio.  There was a lot to see - a couple of highlights were historic Mission Control (where NASA monitored all of the Apollo and  most of the Gemini missions) and Rocket Park where we were awed by the size of the Saturn V Rocket (over 36 stories tall!).




My little space explorers


It was a fun little getaway!