Texan Adventures !!!

My friend Ismail is irked over me for writing just abt cemeteries part of our tour. So I decided to write something more about tourist attractions we visited in our last weekend.

After the scary ride of previous night, next day morning, we caught a glimpse of beautiful sunrise from our seashore condo. It was a multi-storied condo and we were in top most floor room with a verandah facing the beach. I thank both Ismail for booking such wonderful spot and Taskeen for making us see that beautiful sight in morning. The sight was amazing..we were directly looking in to sea.... straight in to line of sun rise...we could see the colour of sky changing from yellow to pink to rose and then bright red as sun was rising swiftly. Small boats and Ships sailing just in front of sea was as if like they are on its way to Sun's mouth.

Our first stop of morning was USS Lexington - Aircraft Carrier of US navy in World war -2. I never knew aircraft carrier was an war factory cum battle field cum navy soldiers home. It had everything right from manufacturing small weapons to producing food,water for soldiers till fighting the war with enemies in sea. This naval treasure had destroyed hundreds of Japaneese aircrafts and ships in world war 2.
We got to go inside the ships deck and see the world within...
Steam Turbines engines, huge Propellers, Boilers, were of sizes we had never seen before....
Though the ship stays in water 24*7 but still crew has no water to drink, as its all saline water..soln ?? Fresh Water Production unit..using process of electrolysis they break salt water molecules an produce 180,000 Gallons of fresh water per day.
In house medical facilities has surgical rooms, Dental Facilities etc.
We also saw Library, Church, Canteen, US mail room, etc underneath the deck. Weopons storage unit had huge torpedoes, landmines which looked like a big iron ball with small cap at the top (just like how we see bombs in cartoons), its just layed on top of sea bed to destroy submarines.
Jet aircrafts need high speed taxiway before taking off but ship deck is just few metres long, solution lies in Jungle book of Mowgli ? yes its Catapult.
Huge catapult will be pulled to one end using heavy machinery under the deck and then pull the trigger....bang !! there is goes....it recoils itself with high speed pushing the aircraft on its way and hence giving it the required take off speed.
Same concept is reversed to stop the high speed landing aircrafts on the deck !!!
I salute the Naval engineer who came up with this ingineous concept.
Hangar Bays was just like manufacturing line of any big industry with cranes, trolleys, heavy equipments to to repair aircrafts.
The ship Anchors was so huge that all six of us couldn't dare to move it an inch...
The Landing Deck has many fighter aircrafts parked with control room, radio station, captains cabin etc.

We then visited Texas State Aquarium seeing Dolphins, Sharks, Aligators, different kinds of Fish and sea animals etc.
Finally, we went to a beach at 'Port Aransas', a small town outside of Corpus. The drive to the beach was wonderful...as soon as we crossed Corpus...we noticed unusal traffic jam...we stranded on road for about 15 mins and we were wondering if it could be passport check.....as we slowly moved ahead we noticed that road we were driving will come to halt as 'Gulf of Mexico' waters making it way between corpus and port aransas. As we got close to water, we were asked to drive our car in to big steamer boat and boat took us to Port Aransas. We stayed inside the car and enjoyed a boat ride inside a car. Gulf of Mexico waters are the warmest...we played a small gamed of football on beach and then dived in to waters till the sunset in evening.
Next morning, we set out to San-Antonio on our way back home. Our first stop was at Almao. Alamo is a fortress built by Spanish empire for native american Red Indians. Later there were series of battles between Mexican army and Texas army to hold that fortress famously known as 'Battle of Alamo'. Itseems, when the Mexican army retreated from Texas at the end of the Texas Revolution, they tore down many of the Alamo walls and burned some of the buildings. The Alamo was then used to garrison soldiers, both Texian and Mexican, but was ultimately abandoned. Several years after Texas was annexed to the United States. Alamo is still one of the top most visited tourist attractions in Texas. Though most of the buildings and structures are destroyed, people throng to pay a site at that location. Similar to our Hampi temple in Karnataka.

We did visit River walk before Alamo but I didn't enjoy much as its mostly for romantic couples ...probably Ismail can write about it.