Day 24: Beaumont to Houston

On January 10, 1901 at 10:30 AM, the first great American gusher roared like a connon from a wooden derrick named Spindletop and forever changed the way we live. Beaumont is now a center for the oil and gas industry (and recently the center of hurricane Ike). No wonder there are so many refineries around here -- and there were supply problems after the hurricane.

The country here is muddy bayou country -- even before Ike. Since we left the white sands of Pensacola Beach, the beaches have become darker and darker as we passed by the Mississippi River and other rivers that are constantly carving river channels and transporting silt down river. Because of this, the Gulf Coast has been advancing into the ocean and adding land mass to the US for the last 16 million years or so. And in the process, creating the muddy bayou of the Texas coastal plains.

It took us two hours to drive from Beaumont to Houston. My brother lives on the west side of town, so we went through town on a freeway system that consists of a number of elevated roads stacked over and under each other. Single exits/entrances are elevated and curved around each other -- It is hard to explain, but they call it a spagetti bowl -- and that's about as good an explanation as I can come up with.

The downtown area is in the middle of the spagetti bowl and quite impressive. The best word I can use to describe the rest of the city is "sprawl." There is no zoning in Houston so the city is a continual mix of different types of businesses, residences, industry, etc. It is about as far on the spectrum as you can get from Naples.

We arrived at my brother's house without incident -- Thank you Mapquest. Gary met us and took us for a tour of his business. He is a partner in a small electrical engineering firm that invents things for people and other companies -- essentially provides R and D services. Gary says that his company is not smart enough to know what they can't do, so they are always pushing the envelope and working on leading edge technologies.

I am under a strict gag order not to disclose their major line of devices. Unlike my cousin who works for Homeland Security and says that if he tells me what he does, he would have to kill me -- Gary wouldn't have to kill me -- He is just worried about being tarred and feathered and run out of town. And I don't want that to happen.

After we toured the office, we spent a quiet afternoon at Gary and Kathy's new place (Jim watching football, me doing the laundry) until they got off work. Then we enjoyed a great home cooked-meal and conversation. We slept downstairs, usually the domain of their two cats, who were none too happy about being displaced. We have a busy day planned for tomorrow in the Houston area.