What is Hell?

I did Houston, mostly the gay scene. I'm not gay and neither is my mate who I stayed with. He'd just moved there, didn't know anyone, joined a Drama group only to find all the male members were gay. It was an eye opener if nothing else.

We also went to New Orleans, which was where I really wanted to go, Austin and the Alamo at St Antonio.

And for me that was America. The only other visit I made was Dallas airport en route to Mexico.

I love it, have a list No 1 New Orleans, No 2 Chichén Itzá. No 3 Angkor Wat.

Not been to No 3 but been to a few a bit further down the list, the cheaper ones travel wise, Prague, Crete, Copenhagen, Tuscany, Amsterdam and other places not in the top ten.

Copenhagen is less than two hours away and Amsterdam is less than an hour.

The travel bug bit my behind in the late 1950's, and I've been traveling since. Been to 88 countries, and that'll probably be it for me. My wife controls my travels now, because of age and health issues. However, she said we can do another river cruise, and we're looking at the Ohio River with American Cruise Line. Hope it comes to fruition. American Cruise Line does a yeoman's job with service and food. Maybe, I can talk my wife into spending a couple of days in Chicago to meet up with Jaye and Joe.

I've two things in mind, nothing solid. Marrakech in the Autumn or Winter and a train journey from Copenhagen to Amsterdam via Hamburg.

I do confess to the guilty pleasure of vicarious travel to those places. I swear, a big 4K flat screen with your favorite beverage and snax is better than being there sometimes. The new drone photography allows one to see those places in the way I would fantasize.

I enjoyed a drive from Paris to Amsterdam in RL but the traffic and unfamiliar signals in the city terrified me. That was Hell.

I had crash in Paris, nothing serious, just cosmetic damage, but enough to get the insurance companies involved.

I hope you are joking about coming back as a rock because even coming back is so impossible

Of course I was joking. Who'd want to.

This guy did.

Doesn't take much to get the insurance leaches involved these days. A dog jumped on my new whip on the way home from dealer. Tiny dimple in rear fender that you could only see in just the right light and cracked the lens on a tail light. Just that was over the deductible but I ate the cost since the dog agreed not to report it.

Check his ID, I bet it's a fake copy. The color copiers these days make it so easy. And with Photoshop, forgetaboutit.

But I meant anything, not just a rock.

It was too bloody complicated not to, a crash in a foreign country with someone whose English was non existent and my French is far from perfect.

They sorted it and my premiums stayed the same. The only problem I had was with the bodyshop they chose. The work was OK but the bloke who was supposed to deliver and pick up the car was a total arsehole.

Lol good thinking but this fossil really went anywhere just transformed , we have our transformation then .

So no one thinks hell exist because we went way out of the subject.

If you want to be scriptural, hell is just the state of mind at the realization that "I could have had a V8.". It is not a destination, only a waypoint. If hell is in your destiny, then death is the final destination.

Since the topic is Hell, mentioning San Antonio is appropriate. The Alamo sucks--in 1836 it sat outside the city of San Antonio de Bexar, but now is a shabby, tawdry tourist trap in the center of downtown. There are some nice clubs and restaurants along San Pedro creek, which looks like a canal in Venice. The restaurants and clubs are overpriced, but it's a good way to spend the evening if you have to be in San Antonio anyway.

For the rest of it, it's full of GIs. Fort Sam Houston is there, which is the home of the Army's Medical Training Center, the Medical Field Service School and Brooke Army Hospital. Randolph Air Force Base is there, as well as Lackland AFB which is the home of more than 100 Department of Defense offices and detachments.

Austin is north of San Antonio, a short drive (to an American at least, about an hour and a half). The two really great places to visit in Texas are Padre Island and Big Bend on the Rio Grande River. Padre Island stretches from Corpus Christi along the Gulf coast all the way to Mexico (and beyond). It's a huge wildlife sanctuary and an extremely important part of one of the North American flyways. Big Bend is a national park and a conservation area along more than one hundred miles of the Rio Grande River. It has desert, deep canyons, and mountains (in otherwise pretty much flat Texas) that reach up into sub-alpine climes. Having traveled extensively in Texas, I'd say the rest of the state isn't worth the powder to blow it to Hell.

(But you can get out on the highway at night and drive fast as hell for hours, and you're still in Texas.

Just a fear to doing the wrong thing.

i think you re right , nothing had been proven by fact as far as i know, we re just relate what we see as a very bad situation to the word hell because we know what we mean by it.

Houston has been truly screwed. Just two events give one a bit of perspective. Hurricane Harvey kept the city underwater for a long time: https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/See-where-Superfund-sites-are-in-the-Greater-12177396.php Then we get rained on by chemicals and such: http://www.fox4news.com/news/texas/shelter-in-place-called-for-in-deer-park-fire-at-itc-facility

I quite liked the Alamo. And I bought some pretty good tequila in San Antonio.