An inexpensive day in Houston
Most of the time, you can find me working on a blog post or one of my books at a Starbucks somewhere in the greater Dallas Fort Worth area. In fact, today I am working on this blog at a Starbucks in Fort Worth.
But sometimes, I am out and about finding new things here in Texas where I have lived since May of 2021. And now that I have resurrected this blog, it seems my discoveries are a good thing to share with anyone reading. So, today I am going to tell you about a fairly recent trip my husband and I made to Houston in December 2021.
We have been to Houston three times since moving to Texas. All three trips down there were so Don could participate in vinyl record shows. He makes enough to cover all our travel expenses and several hundred dollars over that. So, they're worthwhile trips.
Unfortuately, two of the three - especially our most recent earlier this month - left us with no time to enjoy Houston. But I'm going to go ahead and embarrass Don by telling you that he got confused about the date of that December record show, thus getting us to Houston two days in advance instead of a day in advance. Although that gave us the unexpected expense of a second night in our Super 8 Motel, it also gave us a full day to enjoy what Houston has to offer.
Of course, since we never have enough money, we had to do this as inexpensively as possible. For us, that means staying in Super 8. There are less expensive hotels, but not many. Plus, we use Wyndham Rewards, a rewards program that gives you points towards a free nights stay in one of their properties, which are motels, hotels and even resorts ranging in price to rates below Super 8 (about $80 for the one we stayed in, which is in the Houston suburb of Stafford) to well over $300 nightly. We've been using Wyndham for more than 15 years now.
With a full day to explore, we were able to go to a sit-down place for Don's favorite meal of the day, which was breakfast. I'm disappointed I couldn't talk him into doing the same for our dinner that night. However, what we did in between before heading back to the hotel for leftover fast-food chicken picked up the afternoon before on our way down to Houston was fun. And, at our age, calling it a day in the early afternoon wasn't a bad thing.
Our breakfast was at a nice breakfast place called Kelly’s Country Cooking in the nearby suburb of Meadows Place. This place had some good pancakes, but also eggs, french toast and other things you might think of for breakast. It does remind me of Kountry Folks, a restaurant we used to visit sometimes in Riverside, California.
The Meadows Place restaurant is one of seven, all in the greater Houston area. I'm kind of hoping Don will be willing to sample the fried chicken at the Kelly's in Pasadena, Texas the night before we go to a record show in April, as that one, called the Vinyl Record Show of Houston, takes place in that suburb. I mean I know he loves fried chicken, but having had it from a fast-food vendor both of our last two trips to Houston, I will probably order something else if at all possible. And sitting down in restaurants is a good thing.
After breakfast on our December trip, we headed to some free things to do in Houston. These started with places I had pinned onto Pinterest.They're also places I saw on Google Maps near the ones I had pinned.These primarily were three places around Houston’s Memorial Park. As I understand it, none of the places we visited are actually in the park, but they are adjacent to it.
When traveling to the park, we accidentally (or maybe on purpose) ended up behind the park instead of in front of it. The best way to get to this park from anywhere south of Interstate 10 is by going north on on Houston's 610 Loop to Memorial Drive. Turn right on Memorial Drive and the park entrance is on the right, shortly thereafter. The address is 6501 Memorial Drive.
Loops in Texas are streets parallelling a freeway, in this case the 610. (I'm almost always going to identify freeways just by their number, OK?) Since ramps are constructed differently in Texas than they are in most states, all Texas freeways have expressways running in one direction or the other. For instance, along the 610, one side runs north and the other south. You veer to the left to get on the freeway. To the right, you often can stop at a local business, or turn right on some of the smaller streets like Bellegrove, the one running through our apartment complex in Richardson. You can turn left or right at the more major streets.
But 610 and its loop are frequently congested. That was the case when we tried to get to Memorial Park. So that's how we ended up behind the park instead of in front of it.
This took us to the River Oaks Country Club, which is too exclusive for me to recommend you stop there. This is the kind of club that charges a $50,000 initiation fee and looks at your social status before considering whether they even want your money. However, we walked in.
It has a nice clubhouse. It reminded me of the clubhouses of Riviera in Los Angeles and Mission Hills in Rancho Mirage (near Palm Springs.) The only reason I’ve been in those is because I was working professional golf tournaments there as an Executive Event Services employee. I will note that while Mission Hills' initiation fee is lower, this River Oaks Club is a bargain compared to Riviera's which costs $250,000.
To get to the River Oaks Country Club, we were on a street called Inwood Drive. Inwood Road is also the name of a street in Dallas. But the Dallas Inwood takes you on a journey of about 15 miles, from its furthest north neighborhoods to the Trinity River near the south end of the city.The Houston Inwood is only about nine blocks, almost all directly behind either the southeast end of Memorial Park or the River Oaks Country Club. This drive is spectacular because of the houses on or near this street.
I have checked the value of the for-sale homes in this
neighborhood on Zillow. The largest mansions, which are six bedrooms and over 10,000
square feet sell for between $20 million and $30 million. But there are other nearby
homes, only slightly smaller, selling in the neighborhood of $3 million.
Our next place visited was the Bayou Bend Museum and Gardens, 6003 Memorial Drive. We only were able to see a small bird sanctuary on the opposite side of the
parking lot, which also gives one a good view of the back of the River Oaks
Country Club we had just visited. The two are on opposite sides of Buffalo
Bayou, which is “southern” for river, I guess.
It’s a nice view. I’d only heard of bayous being in Louisiana and Florida prior to visiting this one. But Buffalo Bayou flows for more than 50 miles through much of downtown Houston. I think someday I would like to explore some of the other parks and trails it passes by, but who knows when that will be?
For slightly more than free, you also can enjoy the gardens surrounding a plantation-style home at Bayou Bend. And for slightly more than that, you can enter the home itself, which is where the Houston Museum of Fine Arts houses some of its American artwork. Since we are one senior citizen and one adult who is still a few years away from there, it would have cost us $13.50 ($7.50 general admission, $6 senior admission) to tour the gardens or $23.50 ($12.50 general admission, $11 senior admission) to enter the house. Since free was what we were looking for, we passed on this. However, I hope to do the full tour someday.
College students with school ID get the same discount as do senior
citizens. Teen-agers 18 and younger need only pay $5 for a tour of the gardens
only, or $6.25 for the gardens and the house. Children 12 and younger, as well
as active member of the military, are admitted for free.
Also, the grounds and the house are open Tuesday through
Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Guests will be admitted
until 4:30 p.m. But they will only have a half-hour to tour everything if they
wait until the last minute.
I am also fascinated by the history of this house, but I
think I will make that a separate blog post. I will schedule it to be posted a
week after this one, so stay tuned.
Our third place near Memorial Park was the Houston Arboretum
and Nature Center. Unlike the arboretum in Dallas, which we have yet to visit,
there is no admission charge here. The adress here is 4501 Woodway Drive. Memorial Drive is a major east/west throughfare in Houston, but runs through this park. Near its west end, Woodward Drive meets Memorial in a Y intersection, taking one to the Arboretum before crossing 610 and continuing about 3.5 miles further west.
We didn’t realize,
until we were returning to our car, the non-profit organization running this
place was requesting a $5 parking fee. This is payable at four meters in two parking lots near the Nature
Center. So, plan on paying $5
per car. Or coming on a Thursday when parking is free.
This place charges parking but not admission. It is well worth $5 per car. The Nature Center is a
modest display of the flora and fauna inhabiting the Houston area. At this
Arboretum alone, there are five different ecozones represented.
The trails of the Arboretum are even more fascinating. There are 13 short trails encompassing 155 acres of property. Walking all the trails is a hike of more than five miles, but a trail map will let you pick and choose which ones you’d like to see on a shorter hike.
The trails take you through the different ecozones of the arboretum. There are “field stations” with displays showing you what is characteristic of each. These areas are prairie, ravine, savanna, wetlands and woodland. At a ranger’s suggestion, we hiked the savanna area. We look forward to going back and hiking through the other four ecosystems.
The arboretum is open every day from 7 a.m. to dusk. The
nature center is open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. As of February 2022 the nature
center still requires masks for all to enter, regardless of Covid vaccination status.
Our last stop on our sight-seeing tour of this part of
Houston was the Beer Can House. Since this house is a mere two blocks north of Memorial Drive and near of the
Bayou Bend House, if we were to do this trip over again, we probably would have
sandwiched this stop in between our visits to Bayou Bend and the Houston
Arboretum. It required a little backtracking east on Memorial Road the way we
went.
This is another house that’s interesting to see the outside of, but for a small fee you can see the inside. This is an even smaller fee than at Bayou Bend. It’s $5 for ages 13 and up, free for children 12 and younger. It’s open in summer Wednesday through Sunday, 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. But the rest of the year, it’s open weekends only, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Like Bayou Bend, this is a house supporting Houston’s artistic
endeavors. It is run by the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art. I’m guessing
it supports quirkier art than Bayou Bend, since the showcase artwork is the
house itself, recycled from more than 50,000 beer cans. It also maintains
artwork at two other locations about 8.5 miles away. These are quirky
murals and statues in a park and an interesting streetscape next to the park. (The
latter is closed for maintenance until March 12.)
After we saw the Beer Can House, we decided to make our
first-ever visit to HEB Market. Although we hear this is a popular place for most Texans,
the ones in the Dallas-Fort Worth area are all south of those two cities, the nearest about
40 miles from where we live. Even Central Market, a subsidiary of HEB, has no
locations closer than seven miles away. We were impressed with HEB and did buy
a few snacks to enjoy that evening .
We were ready to call it a day after visiting the HEB (since we had leftover chicken waiting for us in the refrigerator and a few yummy snacks to enjoy with it.) So that was what we did when we had to spend a day enjoying the sights of Houston as inexpensively as possible. I hope someday we can return without having to worry about the sale of vinyl records and take in even more of this great city.
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