Day 47 - Lafayette to Baton Rouge: Tabasco Factory, swamp tour

We used the morning to visit Lafayette and the Rêve Coffee Roasters. We ordered almond latte with a honey biscuit. The coffee shop was very trendy and customers were working on their laptops. The WiFi was good. It had been raining all night and yesterday, and it felt good to be warm.
The historic downtown is walk-able and has several small shops and restaurants. Even the neighboring towns seem to have conserved their history with brick buildings with porches and terraces.

We  decided to do the long drive to Avery Island, despite the bad weather, home of the Tabasco factory.

Tabasco factory

We took the tour of the facility. The Tabasco production can be summed up in few steps with only three ingredients: Tabasco peppers, salt and vinegar. The Tabasco peppers are harvested when red, same hue of a little baton rouge (red sticks). The peppers are mixed with salt mined locally, and then put through a grinder. The mash is stored in wooden barrels, covered with salt to seal and stored for three years.
After that, the aged mash is mixed with french vinegar and sieved to remove the solids.
The resulting sauce is bottled and sold.
Around the factory, the air is pungent.

In the Tabasco museum...

In the greenhouses...

Tabasco peppers

We peaked into the warehouse with the stored barrels. Barrels from the last three years are stacked covered in salt and ...they stink.

Mixing the aged mush with vinegar is a slow process

In the gift shop, we tasted the Tabasco oil, mayonnaise, and of course the various sauces.
These samples went from stronger to milder, from left to right. Of course we had to try the strongest one, Scorpion. I coughed and struggled to breath. Bill was sweating. It took a while for the pain to go away. Then the endorphins kicked in and we got a small high. It's highly addictive 😅

After the Tabasco factory, we took a swamp tour at Lake Martin, with the Champagne's Cajun Swamp Tours. I think this is their last name. In fact, everything around here has French names, businesses, streets, schools, squares.
We meet a lot of French Canadians vacationing in this area. Our guide pretends to speak French with them, but then switches to English as soon as he can. Come on! Give him a break. It has been more than 200 years!

On this tour, we saw snowy egrets, nutrias, cormorants and anhingas, osprey on a large nest, turkey vultures, great blue herons, and red fox squirrels. The swamp was amazing. There were tall Bald Cypress trees and Tupelo trees. This last is another tree that can survive in water, also used for special bee honey. Its trunk is different from the cypress', because it doesn't have shallow ridges and narrow furrows.

Bald Cypress

Bald Cypress knees

The oldest bald cypress

Osprey

Anhinga drying her wings. They don't have oil on the feathers

Day 46 - Houston to Lafayette

Time to regroup! We have spent so much time in Texas, almost a month. It's true sunup sundown...still Texas!
We decide we need to get a move on to the rest of the South. We are still on a schedule. That's the most annoying thing. We are toying with thoughts of becoming full timers.
We have no time for Beaumont, and the Spindletop, the first oil gusher.  But we have time to stop for lunch at the famous Neches River Wheelhouse Restaurant. Here most of the customers we see this weekday are from the oil companies around here. We see their name tags.
We get a table by the window and we watch boats going up the Neches river, probably all the way to Beaumont. Every time one goes by, they ring a bell and people can get a shot of whiskey or vodka for $3... you can get drunk really easily because there are many going by.

We are finally in Louisiana!

Day 45 - Houston: Tunnels, Rothko Chapel, Montrose, San Jacinto Battleground

Houston has an extensive underground tunnel system. They are in the basement of the city and they go all over the downtown. The tunnels are made of tiled hallways with artificial lights and they are lined with small fast food places, barbers, jewelry shops and occasionally by a gym. Security guards, lawyers, public officers, they all go down for lunch break and then reemerge through elevators or escalators to the foyer of a bank or a shopping mall inside one of the many shining skyscrapers downtown. Only a few brave souls walk in between buildings on the surface. I imagine in the summer this tunnel system gets used a lot.

We reemerge by Alley Theater...

The Montrose area of Houston is an elegant residential neighborhood, I assume for students and university professors and their families. It reminds me of Palo Alto in California.

We went to visit the Rothko Chapel which contains on its walls fourteen black but color-hued paintings by Mark Rothko, an American abstract expressionist.

Inside I recognized religious elements according to my interpretation from my life experience. I saw the trinity, the crossing of the naves and the four evangelists, Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, the choir, where the panel has a raised and taller frame at the bottom, and the cupola. Everything is  perfectly symmetrical which gives serenity to the eye, but it is also a dark place with the large black panels enhancing the gravitas of the place. Photos were not allowed. 

In the garden, the sculpture, Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk stands by a reflecting pool, dedicated to Martin Luther King. We sat on a bench outside. It had a very peaceful feeling, and it felt good after all the hectic travelling.  John and Dominique de Menil were the founders and commissioners of this beautiful place.

In the Montrose neighborhood...

We drove through Rice University...

It was early in the day and so we decided to go and see the San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site. Here the Texans, led by general Sam Houston, in a surprise attack, won their last battle to achieve independence against the Mexican armed forces led by general Santa Ana on April 20, 1836. In  1936, the monument construction started. It's an imposing column with a nine-pointed star at the very top, facing a large rectangular pond. The star sculpture can be seen as a star from any direction and symbolizes the Lone Star Republic. Texans love this star so much, that you can see it in every home, on every building, even on the walkways. Like in one of the funniest episodes of the TV comedy Portlandia, 'put a bird on it', here is 'put a star on it' 😂

Each side of the monument has words engraved on it, describing the battle and who, when and why it was fought. In the 'who', the Italians are included.
Bill had an epiphany about California, which maybe would have not been able to get its independence if it wasn't for this battle.
Then we got to hypothesizing about California and Texas if they stayed with Mexico...Slavery would not have happened in this territory...no Civil War?...Union against Mexico? Mexico would be ginormous... All the major movies would be in Spanish...😂

...and Italy 😊

Patriotic murals on the refinery's petroleum tanks

Bad picture of Houston Skyline

Day 44 - Houston: NASA

Our plan today - visit the NASA Space Center in Houston - the reality, we left too late, noon, and scrambled to see all the exhibits :/ We didn't realize that this weekend is Presidents Day, so a lot of people were out seeing the sites. The Johnson Space Center tram line was an hour long, and then after the hour visit we waited to get back to the main center, so about half of our stay was used up. Still we saw many very cool things and several movies playing in various theaters in the Space Center.

After learning how astronauts sleep (at all angles), eat (packaged food), drink (their own filtered urine!), exercise (2 hours per day), I decided that I'm glad I'm not an astronaut! Plus there are a lot of things that can go wrong, with possibly deadly outcomes. We saw a film about an Italian astronaut, Luca Parmitano, that almost drowned on a space walk because his spacesuit's water-cooled liner had a leak :( Anyways I'm really glad some people are doing this amazing and adventurous job for us!

Entrance with space shuttle atop Boeing 747

Johnson Space Center building, collegiate style campus

Inside the old Apollo testing area

Apollo test computers, a whopping total of 1MB of data! :)

I wonder what the test "urine dump nozzle" button does?

Data archive for Apollo, no flash drives back then!

Open space shuttle image

The back of an intact Apollo rocket, never used

Francesca touching a real moon rock!

Hello my precious! (big meteorite)

A Robonaut (it may happen...)

Toilet like that used on the International Space Station (ISS)

Picture of an ISS mission with an Italian astronaut (Luca Parmitano) who almost died on a space walk due to a space suit malfunction (the near drowning incident)

Samantha Cristoforetti, Italian astronaut with longest time in space record until 2017 (when another female astronaut broke the record)

Top of Apollo rocket with command module

Side view of Apollo rocket