Houston

Trams from the visitor centre enter the Johnson Space Center, where the control room behind the 1969 Moon landing was restored to its look of the day in 2019. A whole Saturn V lies in a Rocket Park shed. Tram seats fill fast, so get a time on arrival.

One octagonal room holds 14 large Rothko canvases that read as almost black, with only benches and cushions besides. Silence is the rule. In the pool out front, Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk stands inverted, dedicated to Martin Luther King. Entry is free.

Amid grey wooden bungalows sits a low museum by Renzo Piano, its white roof louvres filtering sunlight into the galleries. It gathers Surrealist paintings and African sculpture and charges nothing. Many linger on the front lawn.

A 1926 drinking water reservoir survives beneath Buffalo Bayou Park, its 221 concrete columns rising like a forest from shallow water. Sound echoes for nearly 17 seconds, so the guide claps once to show you. Entry is by timed tour only, so buy ahead.

The dinosaur hall poses its skeletons fighting and hunting, so from below they seem to move. The gem and mineral hall lights each stone on its own in dim rooms. The glass butterfly conservatory takes a separate ticket.

Raised in 1939 on the battlefield where Texas won independence from Mexico in 1836, the column was built, star included, to top the Washington Monument. A lift climbs to the observation floor over the petrochemical plants and the Houston Ship Channel.

The island lies about an hour southeast. After the 1900 hurricane killed more than 6,000 people, a seawall went up and the whole island's ground was raised. The Strand keeps 19th-century iron-front shops that survived. River silt turns the sea brown.

In a park beside the Galleria, a horseshoe wall nearly 20 metres high pours water down both faces. Step inside the curve and the roar drowns out the traffic. Once it is lit in the evening, couples often turn up for wedding photos.

For about 3 weeks from late February into March, the world's largest livestock show and rodeo takes over. Each evening the stadium rodeo is followed by a star concert, one ticket for both. Just before it opens, trail riders converge on the city.

This big park beside the Museum District has a Japanese garden and the zoo around its lake. Its Miller Outdoor Theatre stages free evening shows from spring to autumn, watched from blankets on the grassy hill. A small train circles the park.

Buildings spread across several streets, from a Mies van der Rohe glass hall to the Kinder Building opened in 2020. Two of them are joined by an underground passage that is itself a James Turrell light work, its walls slowly changing colour as you walk.

A railroad upholsterer, John Milkovisch, spent two decades from 1968 cladding his house in over 50,000 flattened beer cans. Garlands of can tops hang from the eaves and jingle in the wind. The Orange Show foundation now looks after it and opens it to visitors.

About 40km southeast of downtown, a timber boardwalk on the edge of Galveston Bay lined with seafood restaurants and rides. A wooden roller coaster loops out above the shallows. Plenty of visitors time dinner for sunset over the bay.

Three glass pyramids on Galveston Island, one each for a rainforest, an aquarium and a science centre. Inside the rainforest pyramid it is warm and humid enough that jackets come off at the door. The aquarium keeps a penguin colony.

On the Rice University campus, James Turrell built this grass-covered, pyramid-shaped pavilion in 2012. At sunrise and sunset the lights under the roof shift colour, changing how the sky looks through the square opening. Those viewings take advance sign-ups.