US Road Trip - day 9

Oct 15, 2005

In the morning I visited Ramya's place. Aparna had flown in to College station to meet Ramya. I also met Pradeep for the first time here. College station is a really nice peaceful place. Inspite of pulling Ramya's leg about living in College station after spending so many years in LA, I really liked it. Early in the morning we saw, thousands of birds in a Mall. They were all over the parking lot, on the telephone lines, on the trees, everywhere. Reminded me of Birds the alfred hitchcock movie. I showed Ramya and Pradeep some pcitures of my road trip.

We then drove around the university and Pradeep showed his work place. I loved Texas A&M. Its probably the most spacious university I have seen. What a place to study. Ofcourse I believe I had a lot of fun in LA and would have prefered studying in LA than College station.

They have a massaging chair in their house - I enoyed that. Soon Pradeep's friend Shridharan came up. We all decided to drive to Houston. I was quite keen to see Houston, this meant I could meet Neeraj and also see the NASA space center. I called Kalyan up to join us in the trip.

So Me, Ramya, Pradeep, Aparna, Kalyan and Shreedharan started off to Houston. Since there were too many people and we could not all fit in, I made myself comfortable in the boot and enjoyed it a lot. I could see all the cars and the road behind me. It was also quite spacious so I managed spread my legs and even take a nap to compensate for my lack of sleep the previous night.

We were all quite starved when we reached Houston and our first stop was an Indian Restaurant. It was frankly the best Indian place I have ever been to. After the feeding frenzy we drove to
NASA which was going to close in about an hours time. I relally enjoyed myself in NASA. There were exhibits of the rocket booster, modules from the Appollo missions, a space shuttle simulator and severla interesting science experiments. There was also a button pushing game, I amazed myself by coming close to the record of 65 pushes in 10 seconds - I managed 61, but could never beat the record. There were several other games we all played and enjoyed ourselves quite a bit.

We also took a tour of the NASA space center and saw the actual control center for the Appollo 13 mission. Apparantly the movie Appollo 13 is a very accurate representation of what happened in reality here. We also saw a model of the space-station and the shuttle. We saw place where shuttle parts and parts for other missions are manufactured. We also saw some real rockets here that have been to space. It was a great tour.

After NASA, the ladies decided to take my place in the boot and ended up having a ton of fun. I decided to visit Neeraj while everyone else went to do some shopping in a Mall. It was nice to meet Neeraj after such a long time. I also met his wife here for the first time. She cooked some really delicious food. I spent over an hour at Neeraj's place and then the rest came to pick me up. We then drove back to college station.