Drive to Houston

In order to get all of our equipment and our experiment down to Houston 4 of us rented a mini-van and drove all the way from Ann Arbor, MI. It's been a long week leading up to the trip as we've been trying to clean up and troubleshoot the integrated system. All our test cells had to be tested and checked out before the drive and everything packed up and organized. We left around 6am on Tuesday morning (June 3rd) for Houston. We just managed to get everything in the van as our experiment basically maximizes the dimensions possible for it to fit.

Nevertheless, we headed through Michigan towards Chicago and made our way through Illinois. When were about half way through Illinois we ran into a terrible rain storm. It happened to be around lunchtime so we stopped for lunch and waited out the rain. It cleared up while we were sitting there, but it looked like there was a massive storm front hitting that area of the US. There were several thunderstorm and tornado warnings issued for the surrounding area.

We pushed on through Illinois. We traveled down through Missouri crossing over the Mississippi and down along the borders of Kentucky and Tennessee. Right outside of Memphis, Tennessee we stopped at a tiny little Roadside BBQ place for dinner. It was very primitive in nature but the food there was decent. After dinner we continued on down through Arkansas to Texas. The four of us took turns driving switching off about every 2 hours. When we were almost to Texas I found out that there were several tornados throughout the states we had just passed through. Fortunately it appeared that we had just missed them. The weather was clear the rest of the drive. I ended up staying up most of the night switching between navigating and driving.

Around 6am I made the drive into Houston. We were arriving much earlier than we expected. We went to the hotel and hung out in the lobby until our room was available. We spent the rest of the day getting things organized for our stay here in Houston. The hotel we're staying at is nice. The rooms each have a kitchen so we were able to buy food for the group which we'll cook while we're down here.

Several of my other teammates flew in and met us here. Since there were bad storms along the East coast, several of them were delayed. One of the guys on my team was supposed to come in at 6pm that day but didn't even end up making it in until the next morning. Eventually everyone made it. Activities were scheduled to start the next day.