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.