Downtown Houston

Monday we went downtown to the Natural Science Museum.  We had lots of fun there. We learned about fracking, which would have been handy when Noah had a paper on it in the 6th grade, saw lots of fun gemstones, an Egyptian collection with lots of mummies that freaked Lily out, dinosaur fossils and visited the planetarium.

 We walked past this area on our way to the museum and we were a bit confused for a second thinking that we had made a wrong turn and were now in D.C.

 Then we saw this giant statue of Sam Houston (they have these everywhere.  We saw an even bigger one on the drive to Dallas) and remembered that we were still in Texas.

 Alex got to ride a T-Rex.  He thought that was super cool.  He was a little nervous at first, but he warmed up to it.  All in all, a fun day!

Tuesday we went back downtown again, but this time we went to the Downtown Aquarium.

We started out the day with petting and feeding the sting rays.  We thought that was pretty fun.  Alex was a bit shy about it at first, but he warmed up to it.  Lily refused to feed her fish to the rays.

Next we visited the shark exhibit.  We had to ride a train to get there.  We saw lots of interesting sharks in the tanks there.  We didn't feed those.

 Then after the sharks we went inside (much cooler) and visited different areas of water.  We were in the Bayou, Amazon, Shipwreck Pacific, Sunken City and then in India.

 My favorite place of the whole day.  Seeing the white tigers were amazing.  They have 4 of them and we were able to see 3.  They were so beautiful.  I really could have stayed in there all day.  I'm just mesmerized by them.

After we left the aquarium we stopped by the George H.W. Bush monument.  It was right across the street. We didn't make it to either of the presidential libraries that we wanted to.  I guess that will be the next trip!