Miami Florida to Houston Texas to Phoenix Arizona
"...when I first looked back at the Earth, standing on the moon, I cried." - Alan B. Shepard
With a few weeks where I could travel anywhere, I’d been keeping an eye on flight prices and found a great deal to fly from Washington DC to Miami for $50. Arrived and the train from the airport looked very cool, being big and imposing with a design that reminded me of a first-world war tank so I assumed they had been built in the 1930s, especially with all the rivets and such.
Turns out they were built in the 1970s and used in a few places. Chatted with some friendly passengers on the journey and travelled to the AirBnB for the next couple nights.
Next day I headed towards Little Havana where I had red there was a park with locals playing chess and dominos. Was disappointed to find it was a tiny concrete park rather than the relaxed open green park I had imagined, but also that the main strip of Little Havana was very much geared towards tourism and full of tourists.
None-the-less, I had a drink at the famous Ball & Chain listening to Cuban music where many famous musicians performed in the 1930s to 1950s..
..and I went off the beaten path (the change from “tourist area” to “run-down local area” was suprisingly sudden and distinct) and found myself a true local place. I'd been told to have a Cuban sandwich and the pork preparation is what makes them so special. Though the sandwich wasn’t glamorous like the ones in the tourist strip, the place had a leaking roof with a bucket underneath, a regular radio in the back playing music for its customers rather than for tourist-image, nobody speaking English and one of the street sellers I recognised from earlier who I shared a nod with on the way in gave me a thumbs up on the way out. It was perfect.
I returned to the main strip and seeking out a cafe con leche I'd had recommended to me, I found a good-looking bar seat in a café - a cafe con leche is the local coffee with a deep strong sugared taste.
I then travelled to the famous Miami boardwalk to have a look.
It was nice and all, but there’s a lot of image lifestyle that doesn’t suit me there and I wasn’t staying in a good area, so I moved on and travelled back to get to the AirBnB.
A bargain $75 flight from Ontario to Houston beckoned so I took a 4-hour bus to get to Ontario rather than fly direct from Miami which would have been much more expensive. Thankfully I didn’t have to wait at the airport as long as this guy..
In Houston I was treated to a tour of the Kemah boardwalk with an insane looking wooden roller-coaster..
..and a delicious chicken-fried steak which is a bit like a Texan version of an Aussie veal schnitty. It was a great day and a delicious meal.
Next day I travelled to the famous NASA Houston base and saw the actual mission control room used in the moon-mission flights (as well as the earlier space flights from 1965 up to the space shuttle flights through to 1992).
Back in the NASA museum, amongst other things including an actual functioning spacecraft research and development area, I saw the actual space capsules used in Apollo 11, the first mission to land on the moon and the last capsule from Apollo 17.
What I really wanted to see though was the astonishing Saturn V rocket they had there which was the type used to launch the moon missions.
This is made from sections of the constructed rockets that were meant to be Apollo 18, 19 and 20 before those missions were cancelled (mainly due to budget costs – each launch cost the equivalent of 1.16 billion dollars in 2016 dollars) To get an idea of how large this is, have a look at the size of the person at the bottom behind the rocket boosters compared to one of the five massive rocket boosters.
Or to see it another way, the rocket all the way on the left of this picture is a scale model of the first rocket to launch a United States astronaut into space. The person (Alan Shephard) sat inside a small capsule at the top.
The rocket all the way to the right of the picture is a Saturn V rocket – to correct scale. This thing is inconceivably massive, 109 metres tall weighing 2,970 tonnes, it’s an astonishing engineering feat to make that object fly up into space. I mean, I weigh a lot less than that and I can only manage to jump a few feet into the air - whereas this 2,970 tonne object can jump up and use brute force to keep on pushing up all the way into space. It's absurd. It uses three stages to push into a 'parking orbit' where the payload then launches out to the moon.
The tour only stops there for 10 minutes, not long enough. Chatting with the tour-leader, he told me that it's not advertised but you can walk out from the museum and grounds then back to the Saturn V hangar on your own and that after the tours stop, there's very few people there. So I did that and just after I got there, the rain poured down in a huge storm meaning I was alone for as long as I liked in this enclosed hangar with this unique astonishing historic rocket. I spent nearly an hour there enjoying it.. and while you may think so with all my gushing about it, no I didn’t climb up to be Slim Pickens in Dr Strangelove..
The great pity of Houston was that I had a terrific deal lined up for a Harley to ride from Houston to Los Angeles and unfortunately it fell through and in the worst way, without communication. Alternatives hiring a motorbike were prohibitively expensive so I had to unfortunately let go of that part of the riding trip which I was really looking forward to. Had a look at flights and found a $50 flight from Dallas Texas to Phoenix Arizona, not far from Las Vegas.
Went to a local bar which was pleasantly calm and relaxed, had a good beer and an impressive Russian meal, then took a bus to Dallas where I saw the location of John F. Kennedy's assasination – the whole scene was so much smaller than I realised with the book depository (smaller closer building on the photo below - 2nd window down on the top right), the road Kennedy’s car was on (middle lane, white X on the road) and the grassy knowl (the slight hill on the left, wooden fence at the top) all contained in less than 100 metres distance.
A short tour of Texas yielded the building where Robocop was filmed and this series of cool statues.
From there it was the early and cheap flight at stupid-o’clock to Phoenix - a place I'd been looking forward to riding with some great motorcycle locations in the surrounding hilly desert mountainscape. But with my great deal fallen through and my funds running low, I couldn't ride them this time, it will have to be next time late this year. I had booked a cheap hotel outside of the city in a location terrific for getting to and from that country desert terrain but not terrific without any transport.
So as a result I pretty much spent three days working on various projects and backlogged work - arranging appointments, course development, video editing, etc. There was complimentary donuts and coffee each morning which was delightful and I had a ride in a 2017 Ford Mustang which was.. well.. a bit subdued. They look good from outside, they sound good from outside and they promise a lot. But inside, it didn’t deliver in experience. I’m sure you can push and play with them - they seem easy - but it was a calm experience, designed to be comfortable and quiet in daily driving. So in hindsight, for a spirited run, I’d take an old Mustang over a modern one any day. I'm interested in the other options around here like this hot thing I saw at the Phoenix airport..
707hp, 6.2 litre Hemi V8. Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat. Probably not designed to be comfortable and quiet in daily driving. The inside driver's-side 'headlight' isn't a headlight at all but a hole to get extra air to the engine. This is no prancing pony, this looks good.
But anyway, so how cheap was the hotel I was staying in? On the second morning, I couldn’t get to the complimentary donuts and coffee because of the foyer being surrounded by police tape. People's eyebrows would raise when I mentioned the area I was staying. Not unusual - between the nice spots I've stayed in on this trip, I've also stayed in some pretty dodgy areas where you have to keep your wits. Quite a number of times, locals I was talking to warned me to "be careful around here" but I'm mostly happy with where I stayed, saw and experienced some great things.
From here, I'm looking at how to get to Vegas - hopefully I can organise a motorbike but we'll see. Then it's up to Utah, hopefully the Grand Canyon depending on weather and other factors, back to Vegas and a short stop in Los Angeles before flying back to Australia where I'll hit the ground running working in Sydney, then the Gold Coast, inland to Canberra, then doing the oil and plugs on my bike riding out to the east coast of Australia to see all that beautiful blue and work my way down the coast. Happy days, thanks for reading!