The trip that was something else

For several months, we had planned to go to Palestine Friday and Saturday of M’s spring break and ride the Texas State Railroad, because you can nearly always get me with a chance to ride a steam train.  But when I went to the railroad’s Web site to book the tickets, I was greeted with the message “Until further notice, the Texas State Railroad will be running diesel engines only on its Piney Woods Excursions.  We are working hard to get our historic steam engines up and running again as soon as possible.”  Which was a buzzkill, since I don’t care a thing about riding behind a diesel head end.

This did, though, leave an opening for a trip possibility L had suggested:  going to Houston for the day to see a couple of the museums with special exhibitions.  She saw that the Museum of Natural Sciences had a copy of the Magna Carta on loan from Hereford Cathedral, as well as an exhibition of Fabergé and one on the Lascaux cave, including a full-size mockup of one of the cave’s chambers.  She also saw the Museum of Fine Art had an exhibition of French Impressionists, to which I’m partial.  Altogether, it seemed like a thing we could do in a day and come home.  I got us tickets to everything.

Because I couldn’t get myself out of bed on time, we started a little later than L had wanted, barely managing to leave the house by 7:00, but traffic on 71 wasn’t bad and speed limits were 75 for most of the way, so we still managed to get to HMNS a little before our ticket time of 10:00 AM.

The Magna Carta exhibit had some padding, which was was going to have to have if it wasn’t to be an anti-climax.  There were timelines comparing the 1066 to 1500 period in English history to contemporary world events, some things about medieval life to engage the kids, a quilted replica of part of the Bayeux Tapestry, which M took pictures of as a way to get a pass out of a homework assignment for her Latin class.  I obligingly translated as much as I could of the Latin in the tapestry (which was easy) and the cathedral window reproductions (not much harder).  However, reading any of the Magna Carta itself or the sheriff’s writ that accompanied it was beyond me.  I do NOT read court-hand at all, and the language was complicated by an approximate ton of scribely abbreviations.  M took more pictures.  (Photography was allowed, but no flash.  The resulting camera shake made me wish for the monopod I sold off some years ago.)

The Faberge exhibit was … Faberge.  There were eggs, large (well, more like medium) and small, there were cigarette cases (lots of those), belt buckles, brooches, and the occasional bigger piece like the tiara made from diamonds which Alexander I gave to Empress Josephine as a “sorry you’re divorced!” gift.  There were also picture frames (many with pictures of Russian royalty), snuffboxes, clocks, fans, and “ohmygod” things.  All of them gorgeous, all of them masterful examples of craftsmanship, but after a while SO MUCH fine craftsmanship at once sent me into overload.

Upstairs, the Lascaux exhibit gave a good explanation of the caves and what they were, and very good illustrations that explained just why the paintings are as important as they are, how they were nearly lost through being loved too well, and how they’re being preserved and “exhibited” (via a 100%-size mockup) today.  Again, it was a good exhibit, but after a while it was TOO MUCH and I stopped taking it in.

By the time we were done with that it was nearly lunch, so we retrieved the car, drove the few blocks up to MFAH, and got lunch at the museum’s Cafe Express location.  T swooped by and swooped up M, and they went off to the zoo while L and I rode the escalator up to see the Impressionists.

I felt the exhibition was a little anticlimactic after seeing the traveling Impressionist exhibition from the Metropolitan a few years ago.  The pieces were mostly medium and smaller ones, there was a LOT of Renoir, whom L doesn’t like because his passion for high cheek coloring in his models makes her think they all must have had fevers, and … well … the Clark collection is very good stuff, but not the great stuff the Met owns.  The exhibit did confirm some of my feelings about the artists:  I don’t like Corot because of his washed-out palette, Sisley is wonderful in his Mediterranean work but not so much when he’s painting northern France (I adore his hard blue Mediterranean skies), Renoir got better-looking as he got older and his beard calmed down, Pissarro could have been a heck of a pointillist if he’d let himself go, and I wish Cézanne had been born a little earlier than he was.

After finishing with the paintings we prowled the upstairs gift shop a bit; I bought a book about a grand meeting of food writers (Child, Beard, Fisher et al.) in Provence in 1970, when a lot of modern writing about food got codifed.  I’m looking forward to it.

On the way back to the car L indulged me in looking at part of an exhibition on Braque, who I find intellectually interesting but I forgot I can’t stand his muddy palette—all grays, browns and blacks.  I surrendered fairly quickly, and we went on back to the car to wait for T and M, who showed up in a few minutes.

It was late enough in the afternoon that we could think about having an early dinner before leaving town, so we drove over to the Galleria for dinner at La Madeleine, which L misses ever since the one near us closed a few years ago.  I noticed that the restaurant was right next to House of Hoops, where T’s husband works, so once we were done we stopped in and said hello to him.  Then M said, “It’s 3.14 and I want to eat pie for Pi Day!” and fortunately Jimmy knew of a diner not far away called House of Pies, so we went there and had pie; M got chocolate cream, L had blueberry, and I got something called French Blackbottom, which was a chocolate mousse pie with a brandy-custard layer sandwiched between the mousse and a LOT too much Reddi-wip.  There wasn’t a lot more to say or do after all that pie, so we picked up and came home, getting back to Austin about 10:30.