Two flights down, eight to go over the course of the next two or so weeks.
I’m not sure whaattt I was thinking booking back-to-back trips, but when I got back from Houston Saturday, I never bothered to unpack. ICYMI, I’m leaving for Europe, um, TOMORROW, so I’m basically still living out of my backpack.
ANYWAY! Houston!
I had never been to Texas before, so when my college friend Waxford invited me to come hang for a weekend, I took him up on it. I packed my backpack, hopped on my Spirit flight (I’m one of the, like, four people in the world that actually likes Spirit Airlines) and headed to Houston for two days.
I got into Houston at about midnight Wednesday and immediately went straight for the food. Waxford and I split hush puppies and a shrimp po’ boy at BB’s Cafe in Montrose.
I was starving at that point and probably would have eaten anything and loved it, but I’m not kidding when I say this sandwich was amazing.
After that, we went back to Waxford’s apartment in Montrose and crashed for the night. I work a really early shift at work, so I’d been up for just under 24 hours once we made it back to go to sleep.
We woke up the next day and grabbed an early lunch at Hugo’s before heading to… drumroll please… NASA!
As a quick side note: I’ve known that I wanted to be a journalist since middle school. My only brief deviation from that dream was in seventh grade, when I went through my Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century phase and decided my future involved space exploration for a whole three days.
My mom quickly crushed that dream when she told me astronauts have to know how to do math.
Anyway.
I’ve always had a deep love of space, as most kids do.
The space museum was pretty cool. We poked around in the Space Center Houston museum for a bit, touching pieces of asteroids and reading about this history of the Space Race before we hopped on a tram and took a tour of the NASA facilities.
The NASA Johnson Space Center tour was the coolest part of the entire experience. We didn’t really know what to expect because we went in blind without reading reviews, but your $30 admission not only gets you into the “visitor’s center” — aka museum — but also gets you into actual Apollo-era mission control, the active astronaut training facilities and face-first into the engines of the space-returned Saturn V rocket!
After we got back from NASA, we had drinks with Waxford’s downstairs neighbor Drea and her sister Evy, who was visiting from California. Then, Montrose bar hopping! We hit up Pisoletero’s, Anvil and Stone’s Throw before grabbing food at La Fendee Mediterranean.
All these places were walking distance from Waxford’s, by the way. I have some pretty mixed feelings on Houston — more on that later — but I won’t deny that his neighborhood was a really fun place.
The next morning, Waxford and I walked to Common Bond for some coffee and pastries before checking out some neighborhood graffiti and then exploring some more.
We had cheap beer at West Alabama Ice House, checked out the Water Wall, walked through the Galleria and then walked along the Buffalo Bayou and toured the Cistern, which was unexpectedly super cool.
I honestly was not entirely sold on touring the cistern at all until Waxford convinced me to do so, but I’m actually really glad that I went. It was really fascinating to hear about its history, see some of the effects of Hurricane Harvey and to play around with the acoustics of the space.
After that, we grabbed dinner — an actual boil-in-bag southern seafood spread — at LA Crawfish and then had drinks at Catbirds, a divey bar near Waxford’s apartment.
We called it a night after that, and then I woke up at 4 a.m. Saturday to catch my 7 a.m. flight back to Chicago.
I wasn’t really sure what to expect from Houston, but I’m glad I went — even just for the face time with Waxford and for that NASA tour!
I’m probably a lot a little biased because Houston is poised to dethrone my beloved Chicago as the third-most populous city in the country, but I was really interested in seeing what the fuss is about.
I was really surprised by the amount of good food, mostly Tex Mex and cajun. But honestly, the traffic was a nightmare! We spent a lot of my weekend just driving around from A to B, and at one point Waxford was joking about how the city just solves all its problems by building more overpasses.
No joke, we passed an intersection at one point that had, like, seven overpasses just built over each other. It was insane.
So, definitely not sold on actually living in Houston, but I would 100 percent head back for a visit.
Now, off to Europe!
