Friday – day 2

We got up early on Friday and I made a round of scrambled eggs on toast for breakfast.  We’d originally planned on doing one place per day – but, however, due to an invite to a BBQ at our friends house on Sunday, we decided to optimise our time touring Houston, we’d need to try and cram two in today.

Our adventure today, started out with a museum, the Museum of Natural Science.  I’m not a particularly big ‘museum person’, though, I don’t think I really know any museum people at all to be fair, so I wasn’t really gung-ho about the whole thing.  However, Ness and Mike were keen and I’d never been so we gave it a shot!  Col dropped us off and headed in to the office (the crisis continued!)

The museum started out dull and dry, very Jurassic park.  Ness and I weren’t particularly interested in the fossils, the dirt, the history…I’m getting sleepy even blogging about it! LOL!

That said, there were some parts of the museum that DID impress me (I know, right? Gasp! Shock horror!)

I enjoyed looking at the mummy (no photos were allowed of the actual mummy), I enjoyed the section about Oil (again, I know right?  Go figure!)

and I loved the gemstones and rocks exhibit as well!

The place was huge – it definitely took care of my exercise for the day and involved a lot of walking which I hadn’t figured in to the grander scheme of things as it left me knackered in our second museum of the day.  Yes, we went to two museums in one day!

Before museum number two, we headed to lunch.  Col picked us up and the 4 of us headed out to Olive Garden.   In most restaurants, I tend to have a go-to dish (or two!).  Something that I simply LOVE about a place and will eat almost every time I go there…Carino’s it’s fettucine alfredo (or the bowtie festival pasta), Chilli’s it’s the grilled buffalo chicken sandwich, BJ’s it’s half a potato and a salad (which is now changing to the grilled cheese, yes, I am an 8 year old American child! LOL!), Chuy’s it’s the fajitas…but with Olive Garden? I don’t have a go-to dish, I try something different each time – it’s bizarre for me!

This time, I tried a ‘limited time’ dish; The 4 cheese pastachetti with grilled chicken…It was a crusted chicken thing that came with lasagne sheets stuffed with 4 cheeses in a wine sauce.  It was ok, nothing particularly great to write home about – I think that’s what my problem is with Olive Garden, aside from the bread sticks, there’s no one single dish that I adore…so my search continues!

After lunch, Col dropped us off again at the Museum of Fine Art; the museum is spread across two buildings.  One houses statues, art from around the world (they have a Chinese section and Indian section and Indonesian section etc), 3D exhibits etc and the other houses European oil paintings.

We walked around both buildings (even though the second building was a little rushed) and Col arrived from work just as we’d finished the first building to join us for the rest of the gallery.  In the European oil painting section they had split it in to two sections, Impressionism and what I can only describe as people, animals and fruit (In case you can’t tell, I hated that section!).

Well, call me my father’s daughter, but I think his liking the impressionists has most definitely rubbed off on me as it was my favourite part of the Museum and there were lots of gorgeous pictures for me to look at.

For dinner that night, we invited Sam and the pups over for a BBQ – which was cooked by my ever improving, personal BBQ chef Col (though he didn’t wear his new T-shirt for the occasion!)

At the same time, (while food prepping and cooking) we had the Aeros game 3 of the Calder Cup playoff finals series on the TV (so there was lots
of yelling and cursing coming from me!) we lost, so we ended the night on a sort of ‘bum-note’ amidst the great and yummy time had by all at the BBQ!