Panama Update #63
October 7, 2008
I remembered where I was when I woke up this morning. I am in Houston, Texas. The hotel is very nice. It is one of those Extended Stay Suites with a kitchen and work area. I spent the day at the Convention Center, looking around and listening to Nikki's talk. The light rail line costs $1 and takes about 20 minutes from our hotel to within 5 blocks of the Convention Center. There are roughly 6000 geologists in town for the convention. There are several hundred talks scheduled over the course of about 3 days. The talks are short, only about 15 minutes each, with several scheduled in the same room right after each other, on the same general topic area. People interested in that topic (such as sediment distribution in river systems) can stay in the same room all morning and see several speakers. After hearing her talk I walked through the exhibition area and got some free pens, etc. That part of it reminds me of the state-wide teacher conventions. They had software and book displays and state of the art equipment. Because it is a geology convention they also had a lot of shiny crystals, gems, and various rocks for sale. They were very beautiful and I think they were selling them for a good price. Some of the stones were made into jewelry and others were polished and for decorative purposes. I found a nice Vietnamese restaurant on the internet that was right off the train line so I stopped on the way back and brought some food back to the apartment for dinner and we ate while sitting around the pool. Tomorrow we switch to a Bed and Breakfast for the last two nights in Houston. We decided before we left to do that for something special for the Yom Kippur Holiday. It is a lot of moving around, but this whole trip is kind of mixed up. On Friday we leave on different airlines and different flights. I go directly to Panama from Houston and she goes to Miami first and then to Panama. She leaves 3 hours before me but we arrive at the same time.
