[Gef]

>>>there might be a sniper hide across Offatts Bayou in the Moody Gardens... AND Can you get from Lake Anahuac to the waters of Galveston Bay? ... Alice Talbot (PC), lives in the Rice Graduate Apartments.

If I still ived there, I'd go exploring on your behalf, but was in the Cypress-Fairbanks area (Northwest). Sorry, I can only help with local color. Where I lived, I could bicycle to a nearby Wal-Mart faster than I could drive, except in the middle of night, and I reckon the area around Rice is even more congested. Alice would want to commute to the yacht or back between the hours of 11p and 5a, preferably, or between 10a and 2p, next best. It'd double the time in traffic if she didn't. Motorcycles can't legally drive between the lanes as they can in California, if I recall correctly.

>>>One PC, 'Nonc' Morel, is from Louisiana, but has (Cajun) family in Houston.

That's hardly uncommon. You can get great Cajun food in Houston. Actually, you can get great anything, and Houston residents eat out on average FOUR nights per week.

>>>And are there rules forbidding private citizens from boating around the harbour areas, due to heavy commercial traffic?

I don't think so, but the people I knew who could afford recreational vessels never had any time to spend on them, and every invitation I got fell through.

>>>>And, of course, there are Hispanic Tejanos who were living there before all these English-speaking Anglo immigrants came along.

In places, sure, but Houston has grown so much, so fast, that the families that have a long history in the area don't seem much in evidence. On one hand, people are people, but on the other, Houston just seemed less part of Texas to me than Dallas, San Antonio, or even Austin. Heck, in Houston, a thick Texas drawal is just as uncommon as a foreign accent.

That's kind of a hard thing to describe, but it came to me when Houston got a new NFL team and named it the Texans. I'm an Okie myself, so I din't have a stake, but the Texans I knew seemed to experience some cognitive dissonance at being thought of as mascot material. When I lived in Houston, I worked as a sales engineer, and I'd show up to a client meeting wearing a cowboy hat. (No, I'm not a cowboy, but a straw hat is practical in hot and bright places.) It wasn't considered inappropriate, but in Houston, it was unusual enough to make me memorable, which worked to my advantage when the prospective client got proposals from my competitors. In San Antone, it wouldn't have made me memorable at all. Probably the main thing I'm getting at is a sense of identity wrapped up in a place. A Houston resident might say he likes it or doesn't like living there; even if he's never lived anywhere else he has a real sense of the alternatives. Most non-transplanted Texans I've met are proud of it without having thought much about living anywhere else, even if they travel. And they still think of it as home even if they've been away for years; that affects me to seem degree and I wasn't even born there.