st1412_webb

SCANDINAVIAN TRAVELER | SHOWCASES | HOUSTON
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4
24 HOURS
in Houston
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Museums
1 There are 19 museums within a 2km
radius of the beautiful Mecom Fountain,
including the Contemporary Arts Museum,
Children’s Museum, Center for Photography
and Museum of Natural Science. You can
walk around the Museum District, but just to
get to the other side of the Mecom Fountain
means getting back into your car and driving
a few hundred meters to the Hermann Park
parking lot.
www.houstonmuseumdistrict.org
The man
2 A bronze Sam Houston welcomes you to
the city that bears his name, and from there
you can walk through the park, admire the
reflection pool, the pioneer memorial obelisk,
rent a paddle boat, or find a stone seat by the
pond and just relax.
The Houston Zoo
3 The Houston Zoo is also inside the park,
as is the 90-year-old Hermann Park golf
course, the first desegregated golf course in
America.
www.houstonzoo.org
www.hermannpark.org
Space center
Experience
gravity on
Mars!
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Get more tips
There’s plenty going on in
Houston. See the sights at
scandinaviantraveler.com
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4 No trip to Houston would be complete
without seeing the Johnson Space Center,
and while the center is only a 45-minute drive
south of the city, depending on the traffic, it
would be foolish to rush your visit.
Here you can experience gravity on Mars,
learn about Nasa missions, send the kids to
the Angry Birds Space playground, and buy
astronaut ice cream at the souvenir store.
And on Fridays, you can have lunch with an
astronaut and spend an hour eating earth
food and talking about all things space.
Lunch costs $50 for adults and $25 for children
aged 4-11.
It is easy to float around this place for
hours, but don’t miss the tour of the campus
– and it is a campus, built just like one to
facilitate innovation within and between the
different buildings.
And of course there’s the Christopher
C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control Center, the mission
control center for the Apollo program.
Currently it is monitoring the International
Space Station and preparing for the launch
of Orion in December. One wall is filled with
shields for every completed mission while
another wall is for those “always on a mission.”
The three that didn’t make it home are
Apollo 1, Columbia, and Challenger.
As the tour guide tells the group entering
mission control: “This isn’t a theme park, this
is the real thing.”
www.spacecenter.org
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DECEMBER 2014 | SCANDINAVIAN TRAVELER