Houston, Texas

Houston is not a city that springs to mind for a vacation. It is not famed for it's tourist attractions but if you have to go there for some reason you will find it to be a good place to visit. No- it's NOT one of the great cities of the world-not Paris, London, Rome, New York, Singapore etc but when you are there you are not unhappy!

The name is known the world over from the phrase "Houston we have a problem" as many NASA space missions were run from here, from the Johnson Space Center in the Clear Lake area.

In our case we only went there because we had booked a Caribbean cruise and cruiseines have started to use the Houston port called Bayport. Houston has a massive cargo port. Now at Bayport it has a small cruise terminal. So we had a reason to visit the city in January 2014 to join our ship and once we had seen the city we were not averse to going back again if there was a reason.

That cruise to the Western Caribbean (Roatan, Belize and Cozumel will be the subject of a future blog)

Our reason was that Houston Grand Opera was playing two operas that we like-Sweeny Todd by Stephen Sondheim and Die Walkure by Richard Wagner, the 2nd part of his 4 part opera cycle known colloquially as The Ring (Der Ring des Nibelungen). One of our long-time friends was singing the title role (Christine Goerke by name) and another, Meredith Arwady sang the part of one of her sisters. So-an opera we hadn't seen in a while featuring two friends, a city that is only a 2 hour flight away and a promise of good warm weather all combined to force us back to Houston.

We flew from Chicago on Friday May 2015 and arrived at out hotel just before 5 pm. There was something we had to see before it closed at 5.30- the view from the 60 th floor of the Chase Building. It is only open during business hours and as Chase is a banking company that meant Monday to Friday. There is no charge to go to the observation platform, the highest in Houston.

From this viewing platform you can only see to the South and to the West-not a 360 degree panorama. Here is the viewing platform.

West

 South

West

Houston, America's 4th largest city, sprawls over an area of 600 sq. miles- you need a car if you want to explore far afield. We are in the Downtown area-the Financial and Theater district. We rented a car at the airport, from Hertz.

We left the Chase Building just after closing time and returned to street level

The Chase Building

Interesting architecture

We returned to our hotel- the same one as the year before-the Lancaster Hotel.

It's the small 12 story building to the left 

Directly opposite our room window is the Jones Symphony Center (seen above at Right)

Tonight there was a Beethoven Piano Concerto playing

We had no concert or Opera tonight. We were just going to have a nice dinner at a Texas Steakhouse.

See you there!