The downtown skyline of Houston. Photo / Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau
Ahead of Air New Zealand beginning its direct flights to Houston in December, Ewan McDonald visits the space base.
Houstontexas. That's how we think of American cities: Paristexas or Athensgeorgia, in case we might confuse them with other Parees or Athens. Unless they are New York or San Francisco or Chicago, which need no qualifier.
Unlike NY or SF or LA, Houston seems to fly under the radar, which is kinda funny when you learn that it's the third largest city in the US, even more so when you remember that it's most famous as the home of astronauts, moon landings, space shuttles and the International Space Station.
As locals will tell you any chance they get, things are bigger in Texas (even the churches: Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church attracts 47,000 most Sundays). So Houston is growing faster than just about anywhere and it can sprawl wherever it wants because Texas doesn't have any urban limits or planning controls and there's flat land clear to Oklahoma or the Gulf of Mexico.
Another funny thing is, we can all name famous people from New York or San Francisco, movies set in Los Angeles or Chicago, songs written about Memphis or New Orleans, but who's ever heard of anyone who came from ...
"This is Beyonce's home town and she keeps a house here and comes back every so often," says our driver, Darrell. "Mostly around the time of the Houston Rodeo. That's so important here that she'll do a concert for, like, $20 a ticket so everyone can see her and understand what it means to be Texan."
Queen Bey? Rodeo? As I'm trying to wed those concepts he nods at the flash gated community to one side of the suburban street. "George Bush snr lives just down there."
Two blocks on we turn into a strip mall. Car wash. Tyre shop. Panelbeater. And a long, one-storey, kinda beaten-up looking, red-painted wooden restaurant. For barbecue. Not snarlers or steaks. That's not the way the grills are in Texas.
"Hi, I'm Misty," says the bubbly woman as platter after platter of meats and bucket after bucket of condiments - we would call them side-dishes, bean and chilli and slaw and potato confections - land on the plain wooden table.
It's a family business; the pitmaster, responsible for the smoke and methods, is her husband, Russel.
The dining room is dark, shutters closed against the midday heat. Signs prohibit spitting on the floor and other antisocial activities. Misty lays out plastic knives, forks and plates.
"In Texas," she explains, "we usually eat barbecue off butcher paper. You can use your fingers." No liquor, neither. The hardest stuff is root beer.
Welcome to the everyday Texas barbecue restaurant. In Houston, there is one on every corner, and another halfway up the block.
Barbecue has that near-religious place in life that the French ascribe to confit duck or Italians to the bolognaise that Grandma makes like no one else. Like baseball, there are world series in slow-cooking, wood-smoking, rubbing and slicing turkey, chicken, ribs and sausage. And then there is brisket.
Brisket is the wagyu of barbecue meat: cut from the chest, richer and tastier because cattle do not have collarbones so the muscles have to develop the strength and tone to support 60 per cent of the beast's weight. In New Zealand it's butchered in a different way from the US; its most famous contribution to gastronomy is the boil-up.
Not here. Russel kneads a dry spice rub into the meat - "there can't be no white spots showing" - marinates it overnight, at least, then cooks it slowly in one of the two big chambers in the back yard, over mesquite or oak logs. It cooks for 12-14 hours, slow enough to keep it moist, long enough to allow the woodsmoke to permeate; rests for two, maybe three more.
You fetch up to the restaurant around lunchtime and order meat by the pound. It will be served dry, not slathered in sauce.
A Texas saying suggests if you remember a barbecue restaurant for its sauce then the meat was ...
Platters arrive. Turkey, ribs, short ribs, brisket, pork, sausages. Misty stands back and we hoe in. Well, more of a dumpster truck than a hoe. To fall back on a cliche that I wouldn't have allowed myself in 12 years of restaurant reviewing, Russel's food melts in the mouth. When we leave Darrell hands out jars of bourbon-barrel smoked black pepper and Russel's Texan Barbecue Rub. Come summer, I'll be needing them.
Sherlock Holmes never said, "Elementary, my dear Watson." Rick didn't ask the pianist to, "Play it again, Sam," in Casablanca. And when the crew aboard Apollo 13 encountered a problem on the way to the Moon in 1970, James Lovell did not tell Mission Control, "Houston, we have a problem."
We're aboard a dinky tractor-and-trailer bus touring Johnson Space Centre in Houston's suburbs. Best known as Mission Control from the pioneering Gemini, Apollo and Space Shuttle programmes in the 1970s, JSC has retained its function as Ground Zero for human spaceflight training, research and flight control: 100 buildings in a green, university-like campus, which acquired the nickname of Space City in 1967.
Many think the US has retreated from space exploration, largely for financial reasons, possibly after some embarrassments in the latter days of the Space Shuttle programme. Not true: this is home to Nasa's astronaut corps; it trains the vast team of scientists across all disciplines from Russia, Europe, Japan and elsewhere, who staff the International Space Station.
This is where they develop and test hardware (rockets and lunar rovers), software (experiments about finding life on Mars or what food astronauts should eat) and human-ware (like, we have these astronauts who are twins and we're going to put one up into space for a year and then check out the differences in their biology ... not kidding. It's about to happen).
Even for a total non-geek like me, this is fascinating. Perhaps I wasn't engaged with the first 20 minutes of the tour, as the tourist tram ambled past the classrooms ... but then we entered the massive, yet relatively basic, hangar where all the nations involved in the International Space Station test the machines and people who are going where (sorry, but you knew this was coming) no human has gone before. And those people are right in front of you, at work. At their day jobs. In jeans and stripey jerseys, they don't look like superheroes.
The fact is, the whole shebang looks engagingly No8 wire. It reminds me of the workshop off Cuba Mall where my grandfather and uncle lathed and soldered firefighting equipment. Except, wo-ho, that's the prototype of the next lunar or Mars landing vehicle.
And that robo-human is so precise, it can type a whole page of text with its electronic hands without a spelling mistake. I can't do that.
Last, we enter the hangar where the Saturn V rocket - the most powerful ever built - has been preserved.
These machines took humankind to the moon and there are only three left in the world. It's a giant creation but, it seems so Austin 7. Did it really? Yes, it did, because I watched it on black-and-white TV.
The tour ends in more modern, interactive displays.
The most popular exhibit, on the school holiday we're there, seems to be the genuine Starship Enterprise from Star Trek. So, we're in a dimension where truth meets science fiction.
What did Lovell actually say? Respecting the time difference between Houston and the Moon, the mission commander - facing his own and his crew's deaths - used precise, scientific, understated language: "Houston, we've had a problem." The rest is, as Hollywood would say, history.
Sunday morning. Seven Kiwi and Aussie journalists breakfast at a soul food cafe, the 50m queue under sunshades for the 30C heat marshalled by a no-nonsense woman who might have been Aretha Franklin's more outgoing, slimmer sister. I braved the catfish and grits platter. I may never be that brave again.
Nearby, the city's flabbergasting Museum District: 19 institutions celebrating craft, photography, fine arts, health, you-name-it, set in parks and flowers and artificial lakes surrounded by a concrete and skyscraper cityscape.
An Australian colleague and I choose to visit the Buffalo Soldiers Museum. You've probably guessed the theme from too many summer Sundays disintegrating to Bob Marley: it's the only institution in the US which recognises the contribution of African-American soldiers, sailors and aircrew to US military history, from the Civil War on.
She, the Aussie journo, has Asian, European and Australian heritage; I am mainly Celt. Surrounded by 20 people of all ages from across the US, we settle into a small theatre for a one-woman performance.
Passionate, angry, accomplished, driven, engaging, Melissa Waddy-Thibodeaux sketches the story of Harriet Tubman, the gobsmackingly brave former slave who engineered the Underground Railroad network of safe houses and forest tracks and led hundreds of slaves to freedom before and during the Civil War.
An hour on, Waddy-Thibodeaux implores her audience to demand their children are told their history, that they learn to read. Only then will they learn, only then will they understand, only then will they become active citizens of the US, she tells them, referencing her performances in jails, refuges and schools.
She asks questions of the audience. I surprise myself - a refugee from audience participation, particularly when it's aimed at me - by answering one. Everyone looks surprised; the only middle-aged, middle-class Anglo stands out in this crowd, more so because he knows the answer.
She asks who knew of Tubman or her network before they entered the room. Two people put up their hands: the people from the other side of the world.
Seems they don't teach as much American history in high schools over there as they do in Australia and New Zealand, Lauren and I agree, as we walk hot, humid Houston sidewalks.
Today the President is giving a eulogy at a funeral in Charleston.
CHECKLIST
Getting there: Air New Zealand will commence non-stop services from Auckland to Houston on December 15, operating up to five return services per week.
Online: DiscoverAmerica.com; flightcentre.co.nz/discoveramerica
The writer travelled to Texas with the assistance of Air New Zealand.
If you need a break from the slopes or don’t fancy a ski, there’s still a lot to do this.