Houston
We just completed a weeks layover in Houston, the second planned objective of our journey. We stayed at an Elks lodge about 20 miles southeast of downtown Houston. The lodge is located about a mile from a major freeway that goes right to the heart of downtown which was our objective for most of our stay. About a 30 minute drive – at 11:00 in the morning. From 6:00am to 10:00am and from 3:00pm to 7:00pm the drive can be two and a half hours or more. I think I already mentioned our trip north through Houston on another freeway. Similar situation on this one. Fortunately we were able to avoid the worst times.
The first three days we did some shopping, quilt shop hopping, and sight seeing. This is no small feat. Houston is the largest city in Texas and the fourth largest in the country. The fold up street map is larger than our dining room table. (And I don’t mean the table in the carbus)
One landmark associated with a near to downtown mall is a water wall. Hard to get a picture that gives a true feeling of the scope of this thing.
To get some idea of size, note man standing in archway
The second three days were devoted to the International Quilt Festival and visiting an interesting feature of downtown Houston.
First an observation and comment. Houston has an arena (think ARCO, or whatever it is now called, only larger), a huge convention center, and a major league baseball stadium within a block of each other strung along the eastern edge of downtown Houston. A half block east is a major freeway that dumps traffic onto narrow city streets with no buffer to take up exiting traffic. Three blocks west is the literal heart of downtown with financial towers, city hall, courts, etc. On a dull weekend day the traffic is a challenge. A weekday is approaching zoo status. Add an event in any of those venues and a zoo looks like a cemetery compared to downtown Houston traffic. There are a number of parking garages and lots. They were pretty much all full with convention center attendees. Yesterday evening there was a Grateful Dead concert in the arena and the times overlapped. Fortunately we left in the late afternoon. My comment to Sacramento: Do NOT put an arena downtown!
The Houston Convention Center is one building three blocks long and one block wide. BIG blocks! Three floors. First floor is one HUGE room (can be partitioned to three rooms each the size of a city block) Second floor is a number of somewhat smaller but still large rooms. Third floor is probably several hundred classroom sized rooms. The quilt show used all of the first floor and most of the third floor. It took us over three and a half hours just to look at quilts and we breezed by many. The vender area took most of two days. Hundreds of venders and thousands of attendees (50,000) all interacting on many levels. We saw lots of interesting things. Among the many people we met and spoke with were a number who had visited, lived in, or had friends and relatives who lived in Northern California and even Auburn. All spoke of their experience fondly.
This quilt is more novelty than serious competition. We have other pictures that I can’t find right now.
One day we took a mid-day break from the show and walked around downtown Houston but we did it in a unique way. Earlier I mentioned the skyways that connect many of the blocks of downtown Des Moines. Houston downtown has a few skyways but there is another way to navigate downtown without being on the streets. Tunnels! Literally miles of tunnels snaking around under downtown streets and buildings. The tunnels are not just passageways. It is an underground city. There is pretty much everything but a grocery store. Many food courts with everything imaginable to eat. Jewelers, dry cleaners, barbers and salons, dentists, physicians, banks, convenience stores, pharmacies, clothing, sporting goods, Curves gym, on and on and on.
The tunnels also lead to the base of several tall buildings. Here is the view from the 60th floor of the Chase Tower.
Downtown Houston
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