For the first time in the history of our family, we left town before our estimated time of departure. We were motivated by fear. A winter storm was approaching, and we needed to get out of town ahead of a nasty wind. Problem was, where to go? We wanted to travel down the Atlantic coast from Charleston to the Keys, and since we had time constraints, it was necessary to get to Charleston quickly. Unfortunately, the storm that brought wind to Lubbock was also spawning a wall of thunderstorms from Louisiana to Georgia. Little red tornado symbols dotted our route.

At Abilene, we decided to veer south. If we had to wait out bad weather for a day, why not visit the Space Center in Houston rather than a casino campground in Shreveport? (We aren’t big gamblers, but the bathrooms are really nice at those RV parks.)

Mission control during Apollo missions

Mission Control from the Apollo missions era

Saturn rocket

Saturn rocket

An engineering project on the testing floor

We capped off our visit by watching The Right Stuff and instantly creating a new generation of Chuck Yeager and John Glenn fans. In the movie, Yeager casually agrees to test a new plane, which might be capable of breaking the sound barrier, as he sips his beer in a ramshackle desert bar. Georgia exclaimed, “Just like that? He didn’t have to sign any papers?” Poor 21st century kid. I pretty much have to sign a release form for her to even get out of bed in the morning.

Brandon told the kids about how many people believed the first moon landing was faked. This led them to the source of all reliable information on conspiracies, odd occurrences, and strange facts: the Good Mythical Morning podcast. (My boys are still loyal to Rhett and Link, despite not being invited into the studio when we staked out their parking lot on a trip to Los Angeles. I think if they’d known about our Middle Georgia roots, we’d have been shown right in.) Here’s a link to their show on debunking the moon landing conspiracy theories:

We camped on Galveston Island. Galveston looms large in my imagination because of a book I read several years ago about the Hurricane of 1900.

It wasn’t rainy, but there was a thick, spooky fog hanging over the beach much of the time we were there. My mind was already on the weather, as I tracked the progress of the storms ahead of us, and I decided we should download the audiobook of Isaac’s Storm. I love Erik Larson books. His books are non-fiction, but they read like novels, and they are packed with juicy details, which he excavates from mounds of decaying letters, journals, and historic documents. We explored the old downtown, searching for remnants of the great city described in Larson’s book. A friendly dog-walker pointed us toward the neighborhood, close to the beach, where Isaac Cline’s well-built home had stood, and we rode a ferry to the Bolivar peninsula at the same spot where a locomotive full of passengers disappeared into the bay on the day of the hurricane.

Isaac’s Storm is full of all kinds of crazy weather stories, but it is most compelling because it draws a tragic picture of how the pride of the age contributed to the loss of 6,000 Galveston residents. We chewed on the warning, as we traveled east, keeping well behind the big green blobs on the weather.com radar maps.