St. Arnold, What a Guy!

gotta love the name!

St. Arnold is the patron saint of brewing, and yes, there really IS a patron saint of brewing! There are actually several patron saints of brewing. Drinking beer was highly recommended over drinking water back in the day--612 B.C.(?) by St. Arnold because drinking water could make you sick! Sparky heard that about the Mayflower voyage, too. Even kids drank beer because they couldn't carry enough fresh water on board.

So hearing that there was a reasonably priced tour of 7.00 a person, plus a free glass, plus four "token chips" that entitled you to four free glasses of beer, was enough to get Eldy to drive Sparky to the Saint Arnold Brewing Company today in Houston, so he could try the beer, and Sparky could blog about our experience.

The brewery is located at 2000 Lyons St., in Houston, on the north side of town. It was easy to get to, but a little confusing about where to park. The parking lots were not clearly labeled as to where you should park, and we hadn't even started drinking yet! The real facts are--Sparky doesn't drink beer, no matter HOW good it tastes, but Eldy has the discriminating palate when it comes to beers. He loves a good craft brewery and this one seemed to be excellent. The brewery taps open at 3:00 PM, and tours start at 3:30 and the brewery shuts down to the public at 4:30 PM. It is almost impossible to get in on the weekend tour, the brewery is so popular.

Cool walls and decor in the brewery

The brewery was started eighteen years ago by a man named Brock Wagner, and began as a home brewing operation while he was still in college. He employs 40 people at the present time, which is pretty darn good for only having been in business for 18 years. Brock was our tour guide today. He was funny and entertaining for the half hour tour. He admonished us several times, "Don't touch anything or we will kill you and you won't get to drink any more free beer!"  As we made our way through the different parts of the brewery, we learned lots of stuff about making beer. And part way through, he announced, "Have we lost anybody yet? If you aren't here, speak up!" One joke right after another....

Sparky thought this guy was descending into a vat of beer or hops! NOT! He was just cleaning the vat.

We learned that there are lots of different kinds of yeast to make beer. He explained the subtle differences between ales and yagers, temperature controls and what it does to the yeast, and gave us lots more facts.

Saint Arnold Brewing Company doesn't pasteurize their beer, allowing for more subtle refinements in how the beer tastes from one type to another....They store the beer cold, they ship the beer cold, and when you buy it, you buy it cold. They filter their beer less stringently than the big breweries, so that allows for more taste to come through.

Brock had lots of interesting things to say about his company's beers...

*They use 40 different types of malts, and lots of specialty yeast.
*They hope to process 50,000 barrels of beer this year. Big breweries do millions of barrels each year in comparison.
*The kegs weigh 165 pounds.
*You can make beer from Grape Nuts cereal! If you wanted to experiment at home, it can be done!
*Saint Arnold's also makes a root beer, but Spark didn't get to try it. It's got real cane sugar in it, so Brock said if you have diabetes, you might want to take an extra insulin shot before drinking it!

As Sparky knows nothing of all things beer, many things just sort of passed through one ear and out the other except for these little tidbits of information. There was a lot more information about the brewing process itself which would be very interesting to someone who wants to know more about beer and how it's made.

This company has won lots of craft beer awards, they were all over the wall where the vat storage room was. If you wanted to try Saint Arnold Brewery Company beer, it's only sold in Texas. You know how they say everything is big in Texas? Well, this company has a BIG heart. The company does LOTS of wonderful things for the community....fundraisers....assistance to military families--100% of their sales from Homefront IPA goes to their Operation Homefront assistance program to wounded vets and their families. Sparky loves a company with a heart.

The brewery also has a cozy, English pub atmosphere in their tasting room. After the tour, we sat down for a couple more beers and chatted with two really nice young women from Singapore who spoke perfect English, at our table. For a half hour, we exchanged information about traveling and our experiences from both sides of the world. It was fun! And it gave new meaning to the words that Brock Wagner, the owner expressed..."Drinking beer is all about community." There was definitely a communal imbibing spirit here today at the brewery. The wooden benches and tables setup encouraged you to talk to your neighbor and get to know them and that's what we did.

Tables with their logo

The tasting room was full of people, many of them there for the great beer prices. Anybody who comes to the brewery during the week between 3:00 and 4:15 when they have last call, pays 7.00, gets a free glass, 4 tokens for four beers. Needless to say, it's a beer drinker's Happy Hour. Eldy's favorite was.....

As we walked out of the brewery today, we saw the company car outside in the parking lot....What a great advertisement for a fun company with a great heart and love for its community! We highly recommend the Saint Arnold Brewing Company tour. It was a fun way to spend a rainy afternoon here in Houston, Texas. Tomorrow, Sparky is back on grandma duty for the afternoon, and she gets to play J.C. Penney Portrait studio with the baby! Yay!

A Hindu Blessing

Today we went to the Hindu Temple in the Woodlands so Kerry and Bigyan's new baby could receive a blessing at the temple. We have so little knowledge of the Hindu religion, it's embarrassing, other than the little bit we learned in school. The baby's dad is from Nepal, India and family customs are that the baby is to receive a blessing ceremony within a certain number of days old. Kerry told me about another custom where the baby is to sleep one night with a knife and a book under his mattress, so that the knife will bring him strength, and the book will make him smart.

We had never been inside a temple before. First, we took off our shoes before entering. There were racks and racks for people's shoes outside the temple entrance.

It was interesting to see the different deities inside. 

Barron was very quiet while inside the temple. He was sleeping! Here are the proud parents.

And here is the proud dad, Bigyan.....

We were given a little bit of an explanation by an elderly gentleman there, but he was very difficult to understand. There was some kind of ceremony already taking place when we arrived, and it appeared that they were celebrating the first year anniversary of the temple. It was a very casual atmosphere. We were surprised that people were carrying on conversations and walking around the temple while the priest was conducting the celebration or blessings, at least that's what we think he was doing. We were used to being quiet when in the presence of a religious ceremony, but this was very informal today and not many people present, so perhaps this was something that didn't require a formal, quiet setting. People were coming and going at different times while all this was going on. Seeing all the things that the priest was doing made Sparky curious about the meanings of his actions and the symbolism behind it.

We waited for awhile and it appeared that we were not going to be able to see the baby be blessed, so Eldy and I headed for home....Kerry and Bigyan waited at the temple to feed Barron before heading home, and shortly after that, we got the message that they managed to have the priest see Barron after all and get the blessing in. We missed it! Phooey!

Back home today, we starting planning for where we are going next when we leave June 25th. Eldy's son called, and the kids are going crazy at home, bored out of their minds, so he suggested a trip to see Papa and Jeannie....as in a trip in the motorhome somewhere for a week or two. Looks like we will be planning a trip with two grandkids on board in the near future, a trip with Cate, 12, and Trevor, 8. Eldy is researching where to go, and Sparky is looking at activities and amenities where we might be. It will be a BUSY two weeks with grandchildren living with us! Gotta get prepared......Bye for now......

Opening Day at Trader Joe's in the Woodlands

Were we crazy to want to go to the opening of the new Trader Joe's in the Woodlands today? Yep! I would say crazy as a fox, because of the values we saw there today but definitely NOT in this case! But we were part of the madness anyway. Parking lots completely full all over the place outside, blocks and blocks from the store itself. Inside, the store was jammed, the lines to check out were an hour long and snaked from the front door to the back of the store and around the perimeter of the store.

Trader Joe's is a store that is owned by Aldi's, the discount grocer. Trader Joe's is a grocery store that markets itself to an upscale, educated community with an emphasis on value.  It seems to be equal parts natural foods, specialty foods, a neighborhood store, and a discount warehouse. It claims that much of the food that is sold is natural and made without artificial ingredients.

The workers wear Hawaiian shirts, and seem young and enthusiastic about working there. Of course, they just started today. Being that it was opening day, and the store was jammed, everybody who worked there was frantically trying to stock shelves, pass out free food samples and answer questions. They had some WONDERFUL food to try today...sweet/sour chicken with rice, cheese from New Zealand from grass fed cows....

Oh, yeah...FREE food! (That was the main reason Sparky wanted to go, dontcha know! says E.) Trader Joe's claims they are willing to open any of their packaged items if you want to try before you buy...We didn't test that claim...The store was too packed! They even had a young man playing steel drums in keeping with the tropical feel of the store opening today. He was very good. Sparky LOVES steel drums...Eldo had to hustle her out of Trader Joe's before she starting hanging out to hear the steel drums and making impulsive purchases. But she'll be back!

We'll definitely go back after about a week, when things have calmed down...They had some really interesting products there. Sparky likes the idea that a lot of their stuff is organic and free of artificial ingredients, like their bread. They have a big sign that says you'll need to refrigerate it because it doesn't have preservatives in it. Everything on the shelves is visually appealing and many products have unusual names. Awesome!

Trader Joe's puts out a flyer called the Fearless Flyer. It's part comic book, part newsletter, sort of a cross between Consumer Reports and Mad Magazine, the company says. Here's a page from the June Fearless Flyer.... They've got kind of a folksy sense of humor throughout the store and in their little newspaper, it's an enjoyable quick read...We'll definitely go back this week to try some products....For now, it's time to go home and do some research about where we are heading to next..maybe with some more grandkids on board! (Eldy's grandkids!) Sparky owes him big time after spending four weeks in hot, hot Texas so she could spend time with her daughter and the new baby. (Didn't she say "share and share alike" not that long ago, folks? asks E.) Yup, I sure did.......

Gramma Sparky Gets Her Day

This is a Grandma Jeannie blog today...you guys can skip it, and the women can go "O-o-o-o-o-h" and "aw-w-w-w-w-w..." because this is a BABY blog today....This morning we took care of some basic things like laundry. Then Sparky headed over to relieve the parents so they could run some errands and so Kerry could get herself feeling back to normal by getting her hair done.....

Grandma Jeannie didn't take too many photos...just a few....  :-)  This is one of my favorites....

Little Barron--8 days old

Grandma Jeannie played with Barron a little bit and talked to him a LOT. He was awake the whole time she was there. He was alert, focusing his eyes, and wondering who the heck this woman was instead of his mommy! Grandma sang to him....she changed his dirty diaper...she fed him....she just LOVED the heck out of him...His little cheeks got tons of smoochies.

When Kerry and Bigyan got back from their errands, Grandma Jeannie managed to get Kerry to let her take a photo of her little boy and her. I love this picture of my little girl and her little man.....Sigh......We'll have some photos of the baby's dad soon, for future blogs. Until later.......

Kerry and Barron, 8 days old

Houston's Minute Maid Baseball Stadium

On a lark, Eldo and Sparky decided to run by the Houston Minute Maid Stadium, home of the Houston Astros baseball team, while we were exploring downtown Houston to see if there were any tours available on a non-game day. We were in luck! A tour was being conducted at 2:00 PM and we had plenty of time to check in and get in on it, so we did! The cost was 7.00 for seniors, 9.00 for adults....and what a tour it was!

The one hour long tour takes you through historic Union Station, the main entrance to the ball park...thru the luxury suites, through the broadcast area.....

A thrill for Eldy was to see his beloved St. Louis Cardinals stats sheets still sitting in the press box from the previous game!

The tour includes the Diamond Club, the exclusive club for ticket holders paying thousands of dollars for season tickets and blocks of seats.....

Diamond Club 

The tour guide talked about all kinds of interesting facts-- the HD scoreboard....It's almost half a football field long. She told us about the Chick Filet poles..One says, "chicken is fare", the other says, "chicken is foul"...yuck, yuck!

If an Astro hits one of those poles, anybody holding a ticket from the game gets a free sandwich. She took us to many different sections of the park to get a lot of different views of the park....

Like the view from the dugout.....

And we got to sit in former President George Bush, Sr. and wife, Barbara's seats. Ain't that special!?

We had a tour guide intern for our tour...she did a nice job...But she talked too fast! Sparky couldn't take notes fast enough with one finger on her cell phone, so she gave up and just listened instead. We'll leave you with one fact....The retractible roof can be closed or opened in 13 minutes and you can fit a 21 story building inside it when it's closed.  Ok, it's coming back to me now, how about---all the seats are angled towards home plate. There didn't appear to be a bad seat in the house.

And that really is all I can remember. It was interesting, well worth the money, and Eldy got to do something HE is REALLY interested in--baseball. Sparky thought it was a great tour, too!.....Bye for now......

Houston's Underground Culture

There's a "secret" underground culture in Houston, and many visitors never hear about it...But we found out about it and went to investigate today. Kerry gave us the day off, and after Gramma Jeannie, a.k.a. Grandma Sparky, took a bazillion photos this past week of the new baby,  Kerry said, "Grandma, the J.C. Penney Portrait Studio is CLOSED!" Take the day off, Mom!" OK....We did....But I'm having Baby Barron withdrawal already.

The first thing we did was research how to get downtown and where to park...Houston is a VERY walkable city, the blocks are short! But finding parking can be difficult or pricey or both, or none of the above if you do your homework. Sparky got online and printed out a list of all the parking garages in downtown Houston and how much they cost. (Looks like Eldo's researching skills are rubbing off on Sparky!)  Eldo and Sparky picked the Travis Place Garage as one of the more reasonable daily rates--10.50 for the daily rate and it was central to some of the things we wanted to see today.

Next, Sparky printed out an Above Below Guide to Downtown Houston. A better version of this is available at the Houston Visitor Center located at City Hall, where we picked up more brochures upon our arrival. This is a terrific map. On one side it has all the attractions above ground classified into attractions and sites like-- eat and drink, institutions, sports, recreation, parks, music venues, shopping, theater and tours, and on the other side it has the buildings, streets and tunnels. All the different colored lines are the tunnels under the city. And that's what the underground culture is--the Houston Tunnel system! The locals best kept secret for getting around Houston in the hot summer months. No wonder you hardly see anybody walking around in the high temps downtown! The Houston Visitor Center was just beautiful!

After checking out the visitor's center, it was time to check out the tunnels. It's a whole other city underground! Well, sort of....What it is, is a seven mile system of pedestrian, climate controlled walkway tunnels that connect businesses underground. The tunnels link 95 city blocks. The tunnels connect to offices, banks, government offices, retail establishments, restaurants and parts of the theater district. There are gift shops, food courts, newstands, copy centers, flower shops and more.

Wells Fargo Plaza-very pretty!

At the Wells Fargo Plaza....there is a direct tunnel loop entrance that connects additional tunnels--The W. Walker Tunnel, the N. Louisiana Tunnel, the Harris County Tunnel, the E. McKinney Tunnel, the S. Louisiana Tunnel and the W. Dallas Tunnel and more.....You can access the tunnels from lots of other places in the city--stairwells, elevators in different buildings, and escalators. Most of the tunnels are located in the western half of the city and they are only open during normal business hours.

We went down into the tunnels for a short period of today to explore a little bit. We had to use our map a lot, even with Eldo as the official map guide reader. If you were an office worker, you would have no problem knowing which hallway to pursue, and there are signs occasionally, that direct you to different tunnels...But we sort of stumbled around today, getting a feel for what it was like to be down in the tunnels. It was not at all what we expected...We sort of expected a more "subway" experience, and that was not the case at all...It was VERY well lit, the number of restaurants were amazing, and there were many high quality, upscale restaurants located under the city. One of the negatives about the tunnels is they are not easily accessible to the handicapped, or anybody in a wheelchair. Too many stairs.....Eldo had to keep pulling Sparky along the walk in the tunnels today, she kept stopping to look at the restaurant menus, and kept asking,"Aren't you hungry yet?" Eldo wasn't and he didn't want to be caught in the noon day lunch crowd that soon descended into the tunnels...Time to leave and head for above ground!

Just one of many interesting places to eat below ground

We loved walking around downtown Houston...It's clean....It's beautiful.....And, they just started a FREE bus line, the Greenlink. It's a 2.5 mile route that connects major office buildings along Smith and Louisiana streets to Metro Transit, the convention corridor area, shopping, restaurants, hotels, and the civic center. The buses run on compressed natural gas, and are air conditioned. We rode on it today, only its second day in service and were very impressed with the 7-10 minute intervals offered for pickup, and the friendly, helpful drivers. Once the office workers find out about the FREE bus service, we bet it will be hard to find a seat a few weeks from now! 


We checked out the fountains near the Main Street Square Station along with these cute little guys and girls, waiting for the fountains to shoot as high as 40 feet in the air. They are on a timer, and weren't going off very high while we were there. The light rail trains run right through the fountain area, with the fountains shooting up on both sides of the trains as they come through. It's pretty cool, and even cooler at night.

On the spur of the moment, we decided to ride the Greenlink down to the Minute Maid baseball stadium and check it out...more about that tomorrow!

A New Driving App for RVers?

We're testing out a couple of new driving/trip apps we discovered...One is called "Waze" and the other is called "RV Trip Wizard". We'll report on Trip Wizard another day, we don't have enough experience with it at the moment. Waze is a neat little program used while driving around town...probably more useful for big city driving. Since we are in the Houston area, and doing a LOT of driving back and forth on the frontage (or what locals call the "feeder" roads) and I-45 and highway 249, Eldo read an article  about this little app that lets you know where the traffic jams are, what the local driving speeds are, where the police are, where the traffic cameras are, what road hazards lie ahead, so we thought we'd try it. It's FREE!

The Waze program (available for iphone, Android and Blackberry) is different from other driving and travel apps because it's a driver community app...groups of people are reporting in "now" time where accidents are, where there's a jam up in traffic, and the GPS based system reports actual speeds of traffic on the roadways where you are and around you. It depends on the number of drivers reporting in and around you as to how detailed it gets.

Here is a link that shows you how it works:




















It's sort of gimmicky....you get points for reporting traffic incidents, you get to change your "mood" little icon every 100 miles or at a certain number of points.....little bonus "candies" pop up every so often giving you additional points for just using the program, and there are lots of extra little features that seem to be designed for people with short attention spans, so they will keep using the program. (People like Sparky! says E.) You can "ping" people nearby, your fellow "Wazers" where your little avatar (little car symbol of you) says "hi!" just to make the stress inducing traffic congestion a little easier to bear, you get to make all kinds of reports...."car on shoulder"...."police visible".....where traffic cameras are located...where traffic is "moderate", "heavy", or at a complete "standstill".  The program refuses to let you do anything other than a simple click while you are driving. If you were to attempt a text in an explanation field why you are moving slowly, the program shuts down temporarily and says you can't text and drive!

Here are a couple of screens in the program and what they are showing: The red bars are traffic moving rather slowly...You can see that on I-45 South, since it's gray, traffic is moving at normal speed. Any time the road is red in sections, that means traffic is bogged down. Traffic on I-45 North is moving extremely slowly and at about 9 miles an hour. Down at the bottom of my iphone, there is a major traffic slowdown--traffic at a standstill on the feeder road alongside I-45 by the bunches of cars shown in the little icon on the screen. There are not any side roads nearby at the moment, so the map is not showing as much detail as it normally does.

Here are the types of reports you can access to file your own report, which can be done in a couple of seconds...My only concern is, who is doing the reporting? If it's the driver, then we're going to have a lot of distracted drivers on the road and this program is a hazard in itself. If it's a passenger, or the vehicle is carrying a bunch of car poolers, then I see no problem reporting while driving. What we've been doing is just opening up the program and setting the phone on the middle console. Once in awhile, Sparky checks it to see if there are any slowdowns coming up, or any major accidents. The chit-chat feature is you doing an audio recording of what's going on in front of you as you sit in traffic, at least that's what we are hoping how the reports are being done.

We don't have a CB in this rig, so this little program has been helpful so far in knowing at least WHY traffic is stopped and what distance away the traffic stoppage is from you. According to the information in the program, it will also show you alternative routes if traffic up ahead is crawling, so you can avoid such congestion on your daily commute and take an alternative route. We're not sure if we would use this all the time, but it's a diversion for Sparky to look at while in the passenger seat and we're just crawling along. She's a "baby Wazer" right now and working on getting more points!  She likes it! (Doesn't take much to amuse Sparky, smiles E.)  Check it out and see what you think......