Keith’s Blog – January 2018
Welcome Fans, Friends, and Visitors
Hi. January is one of the slower months. This can be attributed to people saving their money to pay for the presents that they bought and the money that they spent partying for the holidays of December. If December is the month to party, January is the month for a hangover and recovery. I have long thought that if people are over-spending their money for presents in December, they are saving their money to pay their credit cards in January. Furthermore, any month with a public holiday such as Martin Luther King, Jr’s Birthday is a month with generally one less day of people touring while they spend the day with family and friends at home or in the backyard cooking. For the tourist, this can be good as it will be easier for Houston Historical Tours to schedule your personal tour.
Weather in Houston
January is Houston’s coldest month. Be prepared to wear a coat. The monthly average high temperature is 63 degrees Fahrenheit/17 degrees Centigrade. The monthly average low temperature is 45 degrees Fahrenheit/7 degrees Centigrade, and the mean is 54 degrees Fahrenheit/12 degrees Centigrade. The average rainfall is 4.25 inches/10.7 centimeters. It is the eighth wettest month of the year.
Space Center Houston (SCH) (NASA) Tours
This is a good tour to take, particularly in the latter half of the month and well into February and March. You spend most of the time in buildings during this cold, by Houston standards, weather. Once school is in session again, the crowds are smaller, the queues are shorter, the noise is softer, and the tram rides often stop at three sites rather than just two sites. We offer a number of options. The tour is normally eight hours to include all of the sites and activities; this includes about 6.5 hours at NASA and allows for about 1.5 hours in total to drive to NASA in the morning and to return in rush hour traffic in the afternoon. However, if you want to save time and or money by shortening it to 7 or 6 hours by deleting some of the activities, we can customize it for you. You can also save money if you only want the transportation with or without the admission ticket. Transport will drop you off at NASA and then pick you up later. You are on your own to roam about the facility. A tour includes having a tour guide to run you around, making sure that you see everything possible, and to provide you narratives on the exhibits and about the history and why Houston has a space center.
Click here for more information about our Space Center Houston Tours..
City Tours
We offer city tours of Houston ranging from 2 to 9 hours depending on what you want to see. You have two options for 2-hour tours, A 1 and A2. A1 focuses on classical Houston – the theater district, downtown, sports stadiums, River Oaks’s old wealth mansions, the Rice Village, Rice University, Mecom Fountains, the primary Museum District, and Hermann Park, Houston’s most popular park. A2 focuses on the more offbeat Houston where you will see sites that unique to Houston such as the largest church in the US, the most photographed area in Houston, the 64-foot Waterwall where 11,000 gallons of water pour off of it every minute, the 4th largest shopping mall in the US and the largest in the South, the Galleria, the Beer Can House, the Spear House, the Gargoyle House, the art car studio of Mark Bradford or Art Car Museum, a Orange Crush and Beer Can statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and more. If you take a 3-hour tour, you can see all of that plus stop for a break in The Chocolate Bar. A 4-hour tour Monday through Friday will normally include walking through a 3-block section of the underground downtown tunnels and going to an observation deck. The tunnels and observation deck are only open on weekdays. On weekends, we substitute driving through the Houston Heights or driving through the second Museum District by the University of St. Thomas. A 5-hour tour includes a stop for lunch of your choice. Just tell us what food you want to savor. Six hour and longer tours can easily be customized to either cover more areas of Houston such as the Eado and East End or give time to go into museums, galleries, and parks. The two- hour tours cover about 20 miles/32 kilometers, and we add about 10 miles/16 kilometers per hour of area covered for each additional hour. For 4-hour tours and longer, we have about one stop per hour to take photographs, use a bathroom, get refreshments, and or have lunch.
Click here for more information about our Houston City Tours.
Bakery Tours
We offer eight 3-hour bakery tours. These tours can be extended in duration for large groups and for those parties that want to include a lunch stop. In a cold month, warm comfort food is wonderful. These are smorgasbords of a variety of several ethnic pastries for breakfast, snacks, and desserts. These cover different geographic areas of Houston. Different tours can include the following ethnicities, continents, and countries:
- African
- African-American
- Arabic
- Chinese
- Creole
- Czech
- Filipino
- French
- German
- Greek
- Guatemalan
- Hispanic
- Indian
- Italian
- Irish
- Israeli
- Jewish
- Korean
- Louisianan
- Mexican
- Turkish
- Vietnamese
They can also include bakeries that specialize in:
- Breads
- Breakfasts
- Cakes
- Cheesecakes
- Cookies
- Cupcakes
- Desserts
- Donuts
- Pies
Are you getting hungry yet? Do you want to explore more of the world’s sweets now?
Click here for more information about our Bakery Tours.
Monthly Special – Discounted by 23 to 46% Based on the Number of People
The monthly special for January is a walking tour through Houston’s lesser known museum district. If you like high culture, this is a GREAT tour! On this tour you will be able to go inside almost 10 museums and chapels that are all FREE. Some of these are world renown. We walk through the pretty University of St. Thomas area in the Montrose District. The cultural sites that we go inside include: the Dan Flavin Installation, Cy Twombly Gallery, the Menil Collection, the Watercolor Art Society – Houston (WASH), the Houston Center for Photography (HCP), the Rothko Chapel, the Chapel of St. Basil, the former Byzantine Fresco Chapel that now has other exhibits, and the Neon Gallery. We may run out of time if you are having too much fun while spending a lot of time in any or all of these museums. You will also discover a number of small cafes and restaurants in the area. Regardless of how many museums, chapels, and galleries that we enter, you will be more enlightened with the exhibits and Houston.
Click here for more information about our tour through Houston’s lesser known museum district.
Sincerely,
Keith Rosen
Houston Historical Tours
P. O. Box 262404
Houston, Texas 77207-2404
(713) 392-0867
(713) 643-4086 Fax
houstonhistory@aol.com
www.houstonhistoricaltours.com