TEXAS, HOUSTON: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF FUNERAL HISTORY

 November 29, 2022

Our last stop in Texas before flying home was one of the weirdest museums we have ever visited (aside from the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico). 

The 35,000-square-foot National Museum of Funeral History opened in 1992 and, according to their website, has the largest collection of funeral service artifacts in the country. (I can not imagine that any other place even comes close.) The museum's purpose is to "educate the public and preserve the heritage of death care."

I have to confess that I was intrigued just walking through the gift shop to buy our tickets. I could tell this was going to be an unusual experience, to say the least. I was happy to see Frida, but a death mask???

We began with the large Presidential Funeral Gallery.

Just after seeing this famous photo of five living Presidents standing together . . . 

. . . we started learning about their deaths and funerals, starting with George and Barbara Bush and moving backwards in time.

TEXAS, AUSTIN: STATE CAPITOL

 March 24, 2021

We had driven through Austin on a prior visit and had intended to visit the capitol building, but Bob couldn't find a place to park, traffic was awful, and we gave up. This time, however, Bob found a hotel (the Hampton Inn) with an underground parking lot just two blocks from the capitol.  Very nice. In fact, we wouldn't know how nice that parking lot was until the next night when a ferocious hailstorm woke us up in the middle of the night.

Hotel parking lot entrance

The first thing we did after checking into our hotel was walk to the capitol. Like everything in Texas, it is ginormous. In fact, it has the largest gross square footage of all the state capitols. Only the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., is larger. Built in 1888 to replace the previous (and smaller) capitol that was destroyed by fire, its neo-Renaissance style features the domes, columns, plasterwork, and pediments of classical architecture. It is made of red granite sourced from Granite Mountain near present-day Marble Falls, where we had spent the previous night.

Front view

View of dome from behind the building

TEXAS, MIDLAND AND ODESSA: THE PERMIAN BASIN PETROLEUM MUSEUM, GEORGE W. BUSH CHILDHOOD HOME, THE MIDLAND PUBLIC LIBRARY, AND THE ODESSA JACKRABBITS

 March 21, 2021

After enjoying our drive through Texas Tech, our delicious lunch, and our visit to the Buddy Holly Center, we headed to Midland, about 120 miles due south of Lubbock. Midland is not located in mid-Texas as its name implies, but rather in West Texas. It was named "Midland" because it was founded as the midway point between Fort Worth and El Paso on the railroad that connected those two cities. Its biggest claim to fame has to do with THE Bush family, but more on that later.

Midland is located in the Permian Basin, a large sedimentary basin  that includes a lot of oil fields, so it makes sense that Midland is the home of the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum, which didn't sound all that exciting, but we needed a break on a long drive, so we decided to stop there. 

Appropriately, the museum has an oil rig in its front yard.

Posts outside of the museum are topped with engraved granite markers that give a timeline of oil production from 400 BC to the present day.

OYSTER BAY, NEW YORK: SAGAMORE HILL, HOME OF TEDDY ROOSEVELT

While we were in New York City for our son's graduation, we planned a morning trip to Oyster Bay on Long Island, site of Sagamore Hill, Theodore Roosevelt's home from 1885 until his death in 1919. Oyster Bay is about 35 miles northeast of Upper Manhattan. In spite of what the map below says, it took us a good hour and a half to get there from our hotel in Fort Lee, New Jersey:

Long Island is 118 miles long and 23 miles wide at its widest point. The largest island in the contiguous United States, Long Island has a population of almost 8 million people, or about 5,600 people per square mile. Once you get past Brooklyn and Queens, however, it maintains a chic, rural atmosphere. I'd love to go back and explore its small towns, like Hicksville, Hauppauge, and Stony Brook, or even go as far east as possible in Long Island's south fork to visit the famed (and very wealthy) Hamptons, also known as the East End and site of Southhampton, Sag Harbor, and Montauk:

But our trip to Sagamore Hill was more than enough for the morning we had free:

PUERTO RICO: TERRITORIAL CAPITOL BUILDING IN SAN JUAN

Getting dumped off the cruise ship at 6:00 AM is not my idea of fun, but it actually turned out well for us because that meant we had a full morning to finish exploring the parts of San Juan, Puerto Rico, that we had not been able to see before the cruise. We had a cab take us to a local hotel that would store our luggage for us, and then we went (by foot, mind you) to the territorial capitol building, or El Capitolio, as it is known locally.

It's a capitol that would make any state proud, and one that is significantly more majestic and beautiful than many we have seen. Built between 1925 and 1929, with the dome completed in 1961, the Neoclassical capitol is reminiscent of the US Capitol with its central portico, heavy columns, and dome (although the dome is much less ambitious than the grand dome in Washington, DC).

Puerto Rico Territorial Capitol Building in San Juan

US Capitol Building in Washington, DC

We spent quite a bit of time on Constitution Avenue, the street on which the capitol is located. The area across the street from the capitol reminded me of the National Mall in DC--full of war memorials and tributes to great figures in Puerto Rico's past.