"Houston, we have some Lansers!"

On Sunday we made our final stop along the Texas Gulf Coast. But first, we visited the First Baptist Church of High Island. We about doubled the congregation when we walked in! (Apparently a large extended family was gone and that cut the numbers down to about 1/4 of usual) Sweet people, though, and they made us feel very welcome.

Our goal was to visit all of the Texas Gulf Coast, so we traveled out to Sabine Pass, right on the Louisiana border. This beach wasn't as nice as the others, but Trina and Celia still had fun with the seaweed and sea foam--making cakes and pies.

Trivia--Sabine Pass was one of Texas' 8 corners. Do you know any of the others? :-) We think we've now visited 4 of the 8.


We were a little shocked to step out of our hotel room and see that our van had been hijacked! You have to look closely to identify the hijackers...

Guess Chucha and Lita had enough of the back seat. Of course Lita grabbed the drivers seat--this seems to be happening more and more in their relationship!


Now we're in Houston and were very excited about "our" house! Eight or so Innotec guys are here for a conference so they just rented a big house. We were given the largest bedroom to share, which was larger than any hotel room we had!

First we tried out the massage chair...

Then it was on to the swimming pool...with a WATERFALL!...and a hot tub. (Looks like everyone finally had enough of Ella bossing them around :-)!)

Lita had her first ever swim. It took much coaxing. Well, actually, it took a pretty strong push!

And today we visited the Houston Space Center. What a great time! We found it much more interesting than we thought it would be.

This is the Mission Control room that was used from the beginning of NASA until the mid 90s. We sat in the chairs that the families, president, etc. would have sat in to watch the launches. This is also where all of the Apollo 13 drama would have happened. A new thing I learned is that the Flight Director has complete decision-making power, even over the president of NASA or the president of the U.S., because his highest priority is astronaut safety.

Also, those space stations that just appear to be floating are actually traveling at 5 miles a second! Hard to even fathom that!


We all tried to land the shuttle--and we all crashed!