Whizzing Through America: Living Memories Tour, Charleston Park-Houston

The Charleston Park Apartments had everything a newly married couple could want, a place for a bed, a private swimming pool (at least when we were using it), and economical as we never had to heat it. (I had to stretch for that last one as we did run the air conditioner but for a couple who had just moved to Houston away from the [Ohio] Blizzard of '78 and were swimming in March when the natives were still wearing their winter clothes, the heat from the apartments above and beside us was enough.)

We also had a view, of the parking lot from our bedroom. We even had an attached laundry room, unfortunately one that was shared by others and one which we had to get to from the outside. Still, after living in hotels and eating at restaurants for three weeks, we were so ready to call any non-hotel place a home. Before it got too blazingly hot, we even used the apartments' tennis courts. (No longer there.)

Houston truly has perfect weather, about four weeks of it: two weeks in the spring and two weeks in the fall. The other times are either a damp chill or a humid heat. I still comment about Houston's deadly 98's, 98% humidity at 98 degrees. While I worked at Greenway Plaza for Coastal Corporation, I could look out in the afternoon and see it raining from the humidity hitting 100% and see sprinklers on as well.

All of this is why we ended up traveling all around Texas almost every weekend. Several of my already written Memories of Marilyn feature activities that we did while we lived in this apartment.

Picnic on the Floor

Is Pearl there?

The original 'Fun Hunt'. My two younger sisters came down to visit us ten and a half months after we had moved to share Christmas with us. They both ended up moving to Texas later, my youngest for just a brief while but the next to the youngest stayed long enough to get married and have four children before moving [back] to Ohio. The "fun hunt" became our children's birthday thing after they could read but all while we were in Houston we continued the Christmas / New Years Day tradition of going up to the Woodlands, which was also started right from this apartment.

Seeing Texas: Laredo

Unlike the current exit where the north bound lanes of Main Street are blocked and every exiting car is forced to turn right, when we lived their there was no gate and no boulevard apartment entrance. Instead, it was one inbound lane and one outbound lane with a crossover in the median between the southbound lanes of Main Street and the north bound lanes. This is how we came to have our "accident."

Seeing Texas: San Antonio

Seeing Texas: Mustang Island

Then there were the cockroaches. I don't know whether it would have done any good but the apartment complex only sprayed apartments that requested it, not the whole building at a time. All this did was chase the cockroaches from the just sprayed apartment to the adjoining ones until the poison had worn off in the previously sprayed apartment and the newly infested ones finally got the apartment management to spray.

My parents and oldest sister, still younger than me, with her daughter came to visit in our first Houston summer while we were in this apartment--in a truck. It was before seat belt laws and they rode in the back, in the covered bed of the truck, which was well padded.

All in all, there are many fond memories of Texas due to this apartment and even fond memories of this apartment due to Marilyn.

Whizzing Through America: Living Memories Tour, Westbury-Houston

Our first house together needed work, a lot of it. Once we moved in our trips around Texas ended for a long time.

First, the previous owner smoked, like a chimney. Before we could paint we had to wash the walls, rough textured walls. We went through several rags and bottles of Formula 409. The walls ran with brownish-orangish runoff. Eventually we replaced all the carpets because several steam cleanings just didn't get the smell completely gone.


We leveled the house. Most of Houston is on top of clay, which inflates with moisture, shrinks with dehydration, and flows slowly. Even though the unleveling of the house broke some brick and cracked grout, the leveling did even more.

In addition to being a great tour guide, Marilyn was also a great general contractor. She always found the best person for the job, whether it was skip troweling drywall or color matching oddly colored grout and matching replacement bricks for the soft adobe kind.

We replaced the roof after hurricane Alicia. One time when we were painting our largely empty front room, the children's play room at the time, a couple knocked on the door and asked when the place would be ready to rent.


We chopped out about eight feet of bamboo in the back that had encroached from another yard. My grandmother even helped. They got rid of the Mimosa Tree.

Yes, a lot about living in Westbury was about the house. Even more was about our family, which we were having trouble getting started. In fact, we were just about to go in for fertility testing, me, when we had a relaxing orientation trip to Amdahl Headquarters. Then we couldn't stop them. (There must be something about Houston. My sister moved down and had four children, the last birth twins.)

What to do with three young children? The two oldest got to go to the Jewish Community Center's day camp. The oldest went to a church sponsored Nursery School where one of the "instructors" tried to teach her to be right handed. We also got a note from the school that she was stealing other children's Cheetos. Our favorite destination in Houston was Bayou Bend, Ima Hogg's place left to the public. Children weren't allowed in the house itself but we could pretend the massive front yard and garden were ours.

Our neighbor across the street became a local "grandma" to our oldest, even coming to visit us in Fremont after we moved. The neighborhood was filled with children around the same age as our own. It's hard to believe that we allowed them to roam around so freely. And freely is certainly the operative word for my son. Once he found water, he would get his diaper soaked so it came off easily. He liked to roam free. (Most of the time this was in the back yard.) He also liked to climb. The combination of chairs, booster seat, and miscellaneous other stuff he put together to reach the cookie jar... He made it past his fourth birthday, and then we moved.

Whizzing Through America: Living Memories Tour, Irony on the Road

Because of my unknown time to be spent in Houston, originally I thought to stop at a restaurant and have some crawfish, I planned a short day. It turned out not only not short but I started late as well.

I did start early yesterday because of the long day and the heat. For the first couple of hours, I could only look at the scenery on one side of the road because of the sun. Knowing that today was short, I not only woke late but spent my time getting ready. After all, I did want to miss Houston's rush hour. I think I did but with traffic that heavy, particularly on I-610 between I-10 and 59 and again on 59 going north around downtown, who can tell.

When 59's HOV lane came up, almost a completely separate road, I was so excited that I took it, completely ignoring my printed Google Maps directions. (Not to complain but they are hard to read. I will take care of the Google caused problem tonight, namely: all the white space between the instructions and the distance makes it easy to move up or down a line. The rest is my fault: 1) I don't wear my reading glasses when I ride, in fact, shouldn't wear them for distance. 2) For the tank bag to fit well on my gas tank, it is rather close my body and it is difficult to depress my chin enough to see the paper. Which brings us to 3), the tank bag viewing area appears large enough for an 8 1/2 by 13 inch paper and my mere 11 inches slide down. What's more, the directions I'm most interested in are generally at the bottom of the page.)

While I have most assiduously avoided learning the temperature thinking that that might psychologically make it seem hotter, today I took my jacket off until it felt like I was sunburned. I normally wear it for safety reasons, including bug protection. Although long sleeved, my shirt literally had no SPF factor. I can also feel that my face is sunburned even though I put on SPF 70 sunscreen.

On the ride from New Braunfels I found a pace truck, a big semi going the speed I wanted to go and able to block some of the headwind. Finally I had to pull off and get gas and lost it. Almost as soon as I got back on the Expressway, I found another one. After this one through some road debris at me, I realized that my earlier truck had weighted mud flaps on his trailer and this one didn't. I gave up on the modest attempt, I was pretty far away in both cases, to draft.

After the HOV lane ended, I found myself beside a big rig that wanted to move over--into my lane. I wasn't about to argue so sped up, closing the gap between me and a pickup that happened also to be going the speed I wanted to. Sometime later I was thinking to myself that Houston really has a pervasive odor of burned hydrocarbons. But then I thought back to when I was in stop and go rush hour like traffic and hadn't noticed this odor. Once again I sped up, got around that pickup and was breathing better smelling air.

Sleeping in this morning reminded me that my travel plans didn't take into account the time zone changes. Not only is it harder to get up an hour earlier on successive days, but my arrival the night before is later than I had hoped. All of this brings me back to the reason today ended up being such a long day, and the irony of it. After following and not following the details of my Google Map directions, I finally arrive at my destination, a specific hotel in Marshall. Since I do not know whether or not I can maintain my schedule, I typically don't make reservations but depend on the surplus of hotel space. (In now my third cross-country trip by car and motorcycle, I have never had any problem just dropping in and getting a room.) Not so tonight in Marshall, TX. Not to denigrate Marshall, but I don't know of anything there that would fill up over five hotels. The only explanation I could think of is that this is overflow from the Gulf cleanup efforts.

What makes this so ironic is that this was the only hotel I had originally planned on staying at. I was to be camping every other night. For a brief moment, I thought about camping tonight but then as hot as I was, the air conditioning just called out to me.

Instead, I got out my directions for tomorrow and followed them into the night until I found myself a little hope, Hope, Arkansas, that is.

Pictures and memories of living in Houston to come.