Spring Break

A much needed holiday came this week. My brain had given up working a fortnight ago and I got pneumonia so my body was pretty shoddy, a trip away was definitely required!

The French girls (Sybs et Claire), the German girls (Tanja und Anna) and I rented a car and headed to Texas. You see some interesting sites on the road and we passed through a couple of odd small towns. We also encountered a lot of police cars at one point, then discovered later that two convicts had escaped from jail! Ahhh!

Our first stop was in Houston, which turned out to be rather boring! It was raining buckets and everything was closed.. the only people we encountered were homeless or groups of high school girls dressed in sports clothes presumably traveling to play in some tournament. The main problem was finding the epicentre of things and I wondered if the city shut down at the weekend like the financial areas of London do? Either that or it was a city that came alive at night (vampires...?)

one of the very few pictures I took in Houston

We did go to a very large mall in Houston, where we were dry! It was the largest mall in Texas but full of the more up price, high end market shops... my mother will be pleased to find I didn't buy a load of clothes! I did purchase a Lego storm trooper keyring though

 I think it was good that we went to Houston first and I think the weather really effected our opinion of it. I did expect more spaceships...

Then we headed to Corpus Christi, which was BEAUTIFUL! When we arrived we wandered along the harbor outside our motel, then found a restaurant (called the Railway restaurant? I'm not sure) where I ate the most wonderfully fresh shrimp salad. The weather was wonderful

Corpus Christi had a very different atmosphere to the rest of Texas, like most beach towns it's more relaxed and it had many art galleries and museums.

The next day we explored the beaches, firstly the city beach named 'McGee' which was nice but when some clouds came we decided to drive half an hour to Mustang Island and explore the beaches there. We soon found where the stereotypical spring break was happening... you can drive your car (and park it) along the beach (which felt weird) and we drove past many partying youths, wearing neon, blasting RnB from their trucks. It was a very weird, very American site to see and as the majority of them looked under 18, it made us uncomfortable and we drove on, parked and laid in the sun.

parachuters

There were many souvenir shops with a giant shark entrance. I think more shops need giant shark entrances in England

We were going to break our journey up in two on the way home but ended up just driving the full 11 hours, which must have worn Tanja and Claire (our drivers) out but they're troopers!