Casual Conversation

I'm also a space geek. I've never been to Houston, but I had a weeklong work trip to Dallas last year. I was VERY tempted to take my unlimited-mileage rental down to Houston to go to the space center, but I just couldn't fit it into all the other work stuff I had to do.

That trip was actually one of the very few that I didn't end up going to a museum. There just wasn't anything within a reasonable distance that I found interesting.

I have been to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida once, back in college, while I was at a competition for the NASA robotics competition I was part of... And I've been itching to go back ever since, on my own terms, without other responsibilities and a competition to attend to. Art Basel is in Miami December, which is a great time to fly into Orlando, it's super cheap, trying to suck in all the tourists... Then I was thinking of driving down to Miami, and flying back from Miami, but apparently there's rail service between Orlando/Miami (or very cheap flights), I just need to figure out if it's reliable enough to risk my itinerary on it haha.

And there are plenty of interesting museums in the middle of nowhere. Right near my work there's a tiny little museum called the New England Steam and Wireless museum, which hosts a couple dozen historic stationary steam engines (the largest one has a ~20 foot flywheel or something crazy like that), and they almost all work, and they have several running most weekends. It's really cool because you can get right up close to the working engines (and could definitely be killed if you aren't careful), so it's definitely an up-close-and-personal experience. I'd have never known about it without some serendipitous chance, I just drove down a back road one time to look for a place to set up my hammock by the river and read, and I saw the sign. I guess it's not truly "the middle of nowhere", but it's a poorly advertised diamond in the rough.