Got back from an overnight trip to Houston today and the weather in Austin was just great. Left yesterday in the rain. It drizzled on the way to Houston and rained harder as we drove past the refineries and chemical plants in Pasadena. It let up a bit on the Battleship TEXAS. It rained on the drive to Galveston but cleared up while we were looking at historic houses, and cruise ships that look like tower blocks on their sides, and the sea wall, (sort of Blackpool Promenade without the historic bits, or the tower, or the illuminations, or the Pleasure Beach). Came back to Austin today and the sun was shining so I went for a run round Town Lake, what a relief. Actually dispite the rain I did enjoy the trip, interesting stuff.

By the way, cruise ships don't look like I thought they should. My image was always of liners like the Normandie or Queen Elizabeth, but that's not what a modern cruise ship looks like. One of the ships in Galveston was the Grand Princess, a rather slab sided vessel with no funnels, instead it has a cluster of metal tubes poking out of the top. We saw the Grand Princess leave harbour. A strange experience in some ways as the ship sailed to its own sound track. As it pulled away from the dock its loudspeaker system started to play music as if the whole thing was actually a film, instead of some real experience with its own sights and sounds that the passengers were actually participating in. Besides that weird disconnect it must have been really loud on board for us to be able to hear it pretty clearly on shore.