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On our other big sight-seeing day in Houston, we went downtown and the USS Texas memorial ship, and the memorial to the Battle of San Jacinto.
Battleship selfie. You know, like you do.
My wife, on one of the anti-aircraft turrets, taking aim at plagerism
and comma-splices.
A lot of the gear on the battleship still kind of works, which is
cool. This turret doesn't shoot, obviously, but the articulation
works.
Bridge, which we couldn't go into but could photograph.
The engine spaces were amazing, but it was difficult to get photos,
because everything's massive but you can't tell because there's
nothing for scale. I did snag one photo of the engineering main
instrument panel:
The battle site is an interesting walk-around, but not a lot to
photograph, other than plaques and a lot of grass. The memorial
itself is amazing and huge. Here it is looking like one of the final stars in
Super Mario 64:
Everything really is bigger in Texas. Driving back to the house, we
have to wait for a crossing oil tanker.
(I think we were actually waiting for the ferry, but I liked the photo.)
Flying back home, gratuitus instrument panel photos:
One nice thing about this trip was that it was the major long-distance
trip that my wife and I have attempted to take in our airplane where
everything went flawlessly. Two legs out, two legs back, the airplane
was completely consistent and dependable.
Continuing a series of posts that I last worked on, in....er.... February, one of the places we visited in Houson (visiting my brother and sister in law) was the NASA Center in Houston. As a space nut, this was a pretty awesome trip.
The guest rooms we stayed in were very well-equipped:
While we were out on the town for a day, I charged all my stuff.
A few highway photos while we were driving into town.
Houston is VERY big on flyover-overpass exchanges. Here's a good example.
A bit of skyline.
Another overpass set; at least three layers!
A lot of the stuff on display at NASA in Houston is so big that it doesn't particularly lend itself to photography without serious wide-angle gear, and I just had my phone. I attempted to take a few shots to commemorate the occasion.
Here's one of the shuttle carrier 747's with an engineering mock-up
shuttle on top of it, parked outside the museum:
Another highlight of Houston NASA is that they have a complete
Saturn-5 laid out in a horizontal display building. This is looking
down the first stage from the second stage. The first stage is
sitting on its ground carrier vehicle; look at the enormous tires!
An (I'm guessing) engineering test Command Module (the brown bit) with
its escape tower on the right.
As of this trip, I have now seen all of the Saturn-5 rockets on public
display in the US. There's one at Saturn Apollo Center at Kennedy
Space Center in Florida, there's this one at NASA in Houston, and
there are two at Huntsville, Alabama, one inside like the other two
are, and one stacked vertically outside (which is REALLY impressive to
see). I've read there's one more Saturn 5 first stage outside
somewhere in Louisiana; maybe I'll go fly over it someday.
Outside the Saturn 5 display building, they have some rocket engines,
and this. It's a "Little Joe" test vehicle that NASA used to test the
escape system for the Apollo Command Module. You can see it here,
sitting with a command module mounted on top of it.
Another flyover interchange.
While I'm catching up on the status of things....
The plane is fine. In the annual this spring, we dug into the hydraulic system. The hoses were original, and pretty stiff. The flap up/down control was super-stuff. It turns out I was wrong about the diagnosis of that; it was the cable, not the pump. That's fixed. The retraction speed is fixed. We don't really know what the problem is with the pump that had been in there, but I bought another one and that one worked fine. I still have the bad pump to try to figure out what was up.
The brakes still act slightly funny; it will be interesting to find out if it's better or worse when it's cold. We'd decided that the old problem with the mag checks might have been a weak plug, so we put a massive back in the bottom of #2. However, a couple of flights later, I had another bad mag check, so bought and installed a brand new fine-wire plug there, and it's been fine ever since.
I need to take it down to Knoxville tomorrow to get its IFR sign-off. After that, I can start flying it more, potentially.