Little trip to the big city

Last weekend I visited my old home town and had a great time seeing old and new college friends. A group of women more or less my age holds these informal reunions every year and I finally was able to attend one.

Since most of the weekend was spent with a bunch of old ladies in rooms chatting, sipping wine and eating cookies, I didn't get many pictures to share.

But one of our dinners was at Discovery Green, a relatively new downtown Houston park, and a few of us walked over there from the reunion hotel. So I was able to snap a couple shots of some of Houston's impressive urban scenery (I took better photos during a 2012 visit, if you want more).

The restaurant was quite nice, and so was the park. Perhaps a little more crowded than usual since there was not only a baseball game going on nearby, but later that night an NBA playoff game, too. (I SO wish our one major league sports venue was downtown; the San Antonio powers-that-be really screwed up on that one.)

In addition to being in close proximity to baseball, basketball, and soccer venues, the huge Houston convention center is also right there. You can see it in the shot above. Yes, I know it looks a lot like an ocean liner, with those red pipes, but it's a convention center, big enough to host the offshore tech conferences that take up a lot of room.

Here's a couple more shots of scenes around the park:

an interesting fountain

the Rubik's cube-like wall you may have seen in my last Wordless Wednesday post

If the little bit of greenery you can see in these photos looks really green, well, that's because it's Houston and everything always looks greener there than in San Antonio. But we also had some big rains while I was there. The friends I stayed with measured 7 inches in their rain gauge over 35 hours!

On the way home I documented some of the leftover evidence of the rain, at the Colorado County Rest Area near Columbus, perfectly situated to relieve travelers of the tea they drank at brunch...