Houston

I don't have too much to report on Tallahassee since we only stayed one night, the only reason we even left our hotel room was to walk to the TGIF next door. But I do have much to report on Houston! Arriving in Texas was exciting, the dotted state line showed up on our GPS and we quickly counted down the highway exits to one before they started back up around 880 or so. And no, we didn't receive a gun upon entering the big Lone Star State.

Check out our amazing view from the hotel, the sides of the building were sharp corners so our room literally tapered into a point with nothing but two windows meeting on either side. Below is the view next to our bed, we were in the Skyline District (obviously) so it made for some dramatic day and night photos.

Our first night we went into town and grabbed dinner where the weekend crowds start, but the next full day we discovered the Houston Museum of Natural Science! This museum literally puts the Smithsonian to shame, not only is it tremendous but it's well organized and has an amazing variety of exhibits. We of course made our first stop the Paleontology Hall where they had dozens up dozens of fossils and replicas. Just look at the arrangement below, two woolly mammoth fossils are tossing a human skeleton into the air while he flails around pitifully. 

I took about as many photos as my iPhone would allow, but I'm sparing you the time to look through all of them and chose a few of my favorites from each section we visited.

Not only did the museum have an incredible amount of dinosaurs to stare at, but they also arranged them in an interactive way so you could imagine them with meat and skin on their bones just doing their dinosaur thing.

This I thought was rather cool, it's a fossil of a fish eating another fish, fish-ception?

Just when we thought we were fully satisfied with the dinos, we found their Ancient Egypt exhibit, this is the largest one by far I have ever seen!

This is not the real Nefertiti bust, but a near perfect replica (the real one is in a museum in Berlin if you were wondering). And below is the Rosetta Stone, again, not the original (that one is in the British Museum) but still very, very cool to see up close!

We were pretty tired at this point (it takes a long time to walk through large exhibits and lay eyes on everything!) and then we saw they had a Gem exhibit... so obviously we had to visit that. This was also mind blowing, the room seemed to go on forever and it was pitch black, all you could see were large glass enclosures with beautiful natural formations with a spotlight overhead.

The museum also had an impressive gift shop, I had to force myself to stray only into the dinosaur section because I almost left with a massive 600lb amethyst geode that I would have put god-knows-where. I highly, highly recommend stopping into the HMNS if you ever get a chance, best museum I've ever been to!

We grabbed some dinner at the Flying Saucer that night before calling it quits for the day and said our goodbyes to Houston in the morning. Well not quite, we had to get Scarlett Johansson (my car) an oil change the next day and didn't arrive in Austin until very late in the day. But I won't bore you with that silly stuff. Houston is only about 2.5 hours away so I hope we can visit again soon!