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I just got back from visiting Houston, and I can officially say that it’s hot down there. And by “hot,” I mean that I was dying.

We were there from Tuesday until Friday, and it was hot every day. Their only saving grace is that the heat of the day actually causes thunderstorms almost every afternoon, which, in turn, cool off the city enough so the evening is bearable. These thunderstorms are much different than the ones that I’m accustomed to – they only last for about 30 minutes. In that brief time, though, I thought I was going to die. Thursday afternoon was the worst of them all, and it seriously left 6+ inches of water on all of the roads that I saw. It was raining and blowing so hard that I couldn’t even see the building across the street from our office. It’s like it wasn’t even there. There was thunder and lighting, too, along with wind gusts of 50+ mph. The people from the office that we were visiting said that it’s quite regular for this type of storm to happen, but they also admitted that this particular one was much worse than they had seen in quite a while. Actually, since the last hurricane hit the Texas gulf last fall. I’m sorry, but as soon as people compare a summer afternoon thunderstorm with a friggin’ HURRICANE, I get a bit startled. But all-in-all, it was cool to witness for myself.

Oh – and in the midst of this storm, someone was crushed and died at a construction site nearby.

On Wednesday night, my buddy and I decided to drive around Houston to see what it has to offer. We typically do this one all of the trips where we have a rental car, and if we don’t have a car we just meander through the city on foot until we get tired. So in Houston, we drove to/through the downtown area, which really isn’t too exciting. We saw the former Enron building from about a block away, and then found Minute Maid Park (baseball) and the Toyota Center (basketball). Not too exciting, really. So then we decided to just drive around before heading back to the hotel. We ended up in an area of town called Montrose.

While we really weren’t trying to find the gay part of town, we sure as heck did. The light posts that line the street all had rainbow flag banners proudly displayed. Oh, and we also saw a building from across the street that was painted like it was leopard print. Seriously. How more “gay” can it get than leopard-print buildings?!

The next day, while we were out to lunch at Otto’s, we were talking with a gal from the office that is a Houston native. She mentioned that we should stay away from Montrose because it was the “gay part of town.” We started laughing hysterically because we didn’t know that there was actually a part of Houston that was labled that way, but then we proceeded to tell the gal that we must have found it. She asked how we knew, and we explained the rainbow banners. I PROMISE this is how the next part of the conversation went:

Her: “Rainbow banners? Really? I’ve never seen those before.”

Me: “Yep, and I even took pictures of them.”

Her: “Huh. They must have been having a parade or something.”

Laughter ensued.

SO, this means that I’m not the only one that automatically associates the gay part of a town with parades. And, because of this whole “discovery,” I’m now determined to find a gay parade in action to further prove my point.