Wehner Texas 2016: MARCH 27: HOUSTON

Easter was a day of exploration for us. The Easter Bunny left two small sparse baskets in the hotel for us, slim pickings but better than nothing. Before we left for the Gulf, we went to downtown Houston. We walked through the Historic and Theatre Districts as well as a small part of the Buffalo Bayou Park Not far from the Aquarium we found monuments to George H. W. Bush (#41) and James Baker. The downtown area was nice. We enjoyed the public art sculptures and fountains that Raleigh certainly lacks. Since it was Easter morning, the city was a ghost town which made it easy to get around but we missed the vibrancy of the hustle and bustle.

We love “cheese”. If your town has a “World’s Biggest ____”, we are going to get our picture in front of it. So our next adventure started innocently enough... to get a picture of Mount Rush-Hour. Driving into to town it is visible from I45 / I10. There are, what we thought were, four President’s head statues similar to Mount Rushmore. You cannot, safely, get a picture from the highway so we exited and hunted on the side streets. Before we found it, we found... well, we weren’t sure what we found. At 2401 Nance Street there is a rundown industrial building and a fenced yard adjacent to the interstate and train tracks with salvaged President heads (I assume) from President’s Park on Deer Mountain, Lead, South Dakota. Oh, and there was also a 20 foot Charlie Chaplin too. It was bizarre, sort of creepy and sort of fascinating. In our own mind it was a huge find. We were looking for four and we found dozens! Several U-turns later, we eventually found the four heads (1400 Elder Street) visible from the highway and got the coveted picture. Later we did some research and learned more about the history of the American Statesmanship Park (aka Mount Rush-Hour) and Presidents Park. The four heads were President Washington, President Lincoln, Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston. It appears Houston artist David Adickes created most of them for parks in Virginia and South Dakota (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidents_Park_(Virginia)).

With this final adventure, we hit the highway and headed south to Galveston. We stopped at a Saltgrass Steakhouse for lunch and a view of the Gulf. Afterward we took a long walk on the beach past Pleasure Pier. Before leaving town, we stopped to visit the Ashton Villa House, Sealy House, and Moody House.

We decided to take the “scenic” route from Galveston to Corpus Christi – Rt. 6 / Rt. 2004 / Rt. 288 / Rt. 35 What we found is there was very little scenery. The long flat fields of grass and bush were green this time of year with occasional ranches, small towns, and large oil refineries along the way.

We checked into our hotel upon arrival in Corpus Christi and walked to the neighboring Outback Steakhouse for a late dinner.

Downtown Houston