Day 8

After another pleasant sleep in, we packed up our things and made our way around the state of Texas! Since we had a relatively long drive to Houston, we ate breakfast while driving. One good thing about Texas are the roads - there are so many freeways and once you have a destination in mind, it's basically just one road to where you need to go.

We thought we would stop and have lunch at a small town on the way but when we pulled up outside of Woody's Smokehouse with meat hanging from hooks in the window, I was immediately turned off. We ended up going to a nearby Italian restaurant instead. Firstly though we tried another nearby eatery which was more like a meat outlet, but I had to photograph the sign on the front door, which advised guests that guns were certainly welcome in their establishment (a bit different from back home).

The Italian restaurant was pleasant enough, although the majority of the guests were local folk who looked like they had just arrived from church. Before arriving into Houston, we stopped at a local Conroe gas station for petrol - that ended up being a debacle. When two of the pumps didn't work, it took ages to get our money returned from the harried sales clerk before we could go elsewhere.

Houston was another ensemble of freeways although our accommodation was more in the neighborhood area. Houston is really interesting - as the city doesn't have zoning laws, you can basically find any kind of business in any neighborhood, as opposed to having a residential area, a business area and so on. We met our hosts who were quite welcoming - the room was very nice although the wifi didn't work.

Even though it was really hot, we walked down to the local area for dinner and drinks. We had dinner at a funky diner named Barnaby's which we loved - they even had five different varieties of vegetarian burgers. Afterwards we walked to the nearby JR's and Eagle Bars - the whole area was very busy although we didn't really get to chat to anyone (a bit cliquey). After coming back to our room, we checked out airfares for our flight home - it looks like our best option might be a flight home from San Francisco instead of Los Angeles. We booked some standby tickets before heading to bed.Read more