On the road again...

Our time in Houston was over. It had been a good trip, but it was time for us to head back to Ann Arbor. We planned on leaving around 8am, however we needed to make sure 3 of our team members got to the airports. One of them was flying out of the airport near the hotel so we drove him over there. The other two however were flying out of the airport on the opposite side of Houston. It was too far to drive them there so we ended up getting them a taxi. The taxi took about an hour to get there. We left shortly after they were all sent on their way.

It was already hot outside. The AC felt great. I drove the first shift out of Houston. We rotated drivers as we did on the way down to Houston. Everything went smoothly until about noon when we missed our exit. I noticed the exit as we passed it but it wasn't clear if that was the right way to go. We kept driving as I pulled out the map to figure out what to do. The map wasn't much help so we decided we may be on the right road after all. About 15 minutes later we were back in the same place where we missed the exit. It turned out the highway looped back around. Fortunately it worked out that the chicken place we had wanted to stop at was right there so we stopped for lunch. After lunch we switched out drivers.

We charged on. The trip did not go perfect though. Later on we discovered we had missed another exit and were 40 miles off course. We were able to get back on course though without losing much time. We drove through the night and arrived back in Ann Arbor early Sunday morning. We unpacked the van and went home. It had been 23 hours in the car driving straight. We were all ready for a little sleep. We would need to start working on our papers for the AIAA Joint Propulsion Conference which were due in a week.

Day off

Our last day in Houston had no scheduled activities. It was meant to be a back-up flight day in case one of the flights was canceled. We spent most of the day just hanging out in the hotel. A few of the guys decided to go to Galveston beach in the afternoon. We watched a few of the Eurocup games and then dove right into our flight videos. Since we would only have a week before our conference papers were due we wanted to get a head start at analyzing the data.

In the evening I was able to meet up with a friend from Michigan who was working at Boeing in Houston. We first went to a British pub ("Sherlock's Pub") where a bunch of NASA co-ops liked to hang out. We played several games of darts and then were treated to a free appetizer buffet. They had all sorts of excellent appetizers available. After our appetizers we headed off to a burger place for dinner where we met some other NASA co-ops. Dinner was great. They made their own homemade onion rings there so I tried those. After dinner we all went outside and watched the ISS and shuttle streak across the sky. The sun had just gone down but it was still somewhat light outside. It was exciting watching them cross the sky knowing we had watched it being tracked on the screen in Mission Control the day before.

Once the shuttle disappeared from view we headed out to Kemah for fireworks. It was the same sort of show as last week, but enjoyable as the last time. It was a very patriotic moment as there was patriotic music playing in the background. Once the fireworks were over we hung out around the bay for a while before heading back to the hotel. It had been a fun night. It turned out that some of the co-ops I met happened to know one of the girls I went to France with last summer. It was quite a coincidence.