USA2012

9/3/2012: Houston - Rotary Meeting and BBQ Evening
At noon we gathered at the Houston Racquet Club and were hearty welcomed by the members of the Houston Memorial-Spring Branch Rotary Club. It was great to get to know Lawrence that had been so kind to us by email. Raymond and Volker presented our club and Volker made a presentation about Portugal. We then spent the afternoon in our hotel, in the meantime it was pooring cats and dogs. In the evening we went to a typical BBQ Restaurant Luling City Market: you get your food at a special counter and pay by weight. The meat was absolutely fantastic. And we are being so spoiled by Lawrence and all the members are really doing everything so we feel at ease.

10/3/2012: Rodeo Houston
we drove up to Lawrence's place, we all squeezed in his car and a friend drove us to the Reliant Park. We looked at the exhibition outdoors and indoors until Mike Cook joined us to give us more details about the Rodeo Houston. Hie explained that the whole Rodeo Houston is a charity event. At 3:45 pm we gathered at the stadium and watched the show with all the competition in bull riding, bronco riding etc. then at 6 pm started the concert of Chris Young. We came back with the shuttle bus that took us to a park and ride and we found our way back to Lawrence's home with Volker's iPhone where he had fortunately downloaded the map of Houston. Before going back to our hotel we had dinner at SteaKountry Buffet (27,35$ total and pretty good!)

11/3/2012: sightseeing Houston with Nugent Myrick
Tonight was "Spring forward", i.e. we had to put our watches one hour forward, and we barely made it to our hotel breakfast which goes until 10 am... At 1 pm we met with Nugent, Raymond and Françoise at the Oxford Condo where Nugent has his office. He gave us a comprehensive and detailed explanation of Houston's history and then drove us through the main areas in and around town.

There were many things to see on the exhibition grounds, one of my favourites was to be able to see chicks hatching out of their eggs. On this picture you can see 3 stadiums of their hatchingfd:
a) The chick has opened a corner of the egg shelve and will be working his way out for about 16-18 hours.
b) A chick that got just it of the egg
c) A chick that has hatched completely about 30 minutes ago.