A Post for Pops

I have been fortunate enough to have parents who liked to travel. In my youth, my father often did the majority of the planning of our various trips. And because he had a keen interest in art history, we found ourselves schlepping for hours to visit some obscure site that embodied an architectural style that interested him or some work of art that nobody else in the family had heard of. This had varied responses amongst other family members. In the picture at right, you see the family marching toward the Einsteinturm, a building in Potsdam, Germany. And you may be interested to know that of all the sites in Potsdam, it is ranked #25 and has been reviewed by a staggering 14 people on TripAdvisor. All of them gave it very high marks, but as you can see, it is just some random tower to those who don't appreciate it on the same level as my father. See below...







When I was a flight instructor in Long Beach, I was dispatched by my dad to take pictures of some buildings that were an example of Art Deco architecture. When they came to visit me one winter, I took my parents on an Art Deco tour of Hollywood and Downtown LA -- no doubt the highlight of anyone's trip to Southern California. Meanwhile back in Houston . . .

It was another week without calls. It almost became an expectation to wake up with a whole day ahead of me, and with newly found access to a Toyota Sienna, or as my sister has christened it, "Ze swagger wagon," I went for a small road trip toward downtown Houston. From there, I forked off toward Hobby airport, or as many have dubbed it, the lesser, more ghetto of the Houston airports. I had a reason to go, however --the  Houston air terminal, which was built in the middle of the Art Deco movement, and I went there on my own accord!

After Hobby was built, the original air terminal was abandoned and was going to be torn down to make space for a hangar, but architecture aficionados stepped in to save it. It's now a museum focusing on air travel in the 1940s with exhibits on how flying used to be in the good ol' days when folks used to smoke on airplanes and security was non-existent. There was an interesting poster showing all the airline mergers throughout the years, but it stopped in 1999, which was interesting in its own right, because airlines like NorthWest, TWA, Continental, US Airways, and America West no longer exist.

It was a small museum, but interesting nonetheless. However, as you can imagine, like the Einsteinturm, it was not particularly crowded. I was the only person in the museum, which made things very exciting for the docents when I walked through the door. My week ended on a holiday weekend, which made travel back to LA a challenge. Luckily, I was able to hitch a ride on a fancy new 787 Dreamliner, which had two spacious jumpseats. I also received a lunch and a chocolate chip cookie, a small reminder of what flying back in the good ol' days might have been like.