Goodbye to the US 25-27 Nov

Wed 25th
Today we got up and drove a few miles to a Hertz rental place to pick up our hire car, then with me and Tris in the van and Celso following in the car we went to drop off the van. We had only done 1700 miles more than we had originally guesstimated we would do!! So in total we have covered 9800 miles of the United States, it has been great but I'm quite looking forward to moving on now. (It will be over 10,000 by the time we have gone south to Houston)
We drove the hire car down to Galveston, on the Gulf of Mexico about 30 miles South of Houston. It was strange to be in a car, nippy and manouverable, but no loo or fridge full of food and drink!!
In Galveston we checked into a motel and watched telly which is quite a novelty for us, but there is a whole load of rubbish on the TV here.
26th Nov - Thanksgiving
We slept in until around 10am and then went to a place called Moody Gardens in Galveston. We visited an excellent small aquarium which had above ground and underwater viewing areas for seals and penguins, and excellent walk through tunnel with an amazing variety of fish, sharks and a huge sea turtle. We watched Scrooge in 3D which is a really fun film and then learnt a bit about the history of Galveston. It was a major immigration point in the late 1800's when Texas wanted 1,000,000 immigrants per year to populate and develop the state, it was also a place where 1000s of slaves were shipped from the East Coast. But then with segregation and the start of large scale immigration from Eastern Europe there started to be a lot of racial tension and the port was closed.
Celso and Tristan had a Thanksgiving Buffet lunch with roast turkey and beef, mashed potato, pumpkin and artichokes followed by cheesecake and chocolate nut cake, then we drove around to try and find a couple of last minute things (some new shoes for Tris, a fishing rod container etc) but found that all the shops were closed, so it was into another motel close to a fishing shop.
27th November
Today is known as Black Friday (I don't know why) and apparently it is the busiest shopping day of the year. The sales are on and the bargain hunters have been out since the early hours. Last year there was at least one fatality in the crush. We again slept quite late (for us) until 9am and then we went out to join the shoppers. We didn't find many, a few more in Walmart than we have ever seen before and a few irate customers who couldn't find the things they had seen in the ads, but not nearly as many as we had been expecting after what we had seen on the TV. We got all that we needed and then drove to the airport to return our hire car. On the way we were stopped at one set of traffic lights next to a small canal in which we saw several water rats, a couple swimming another sitting, chewing on something, oblivious to the traffic whizzing by. Afterwards we went to our hotel via a mall to have another look around, we could walk back to our motel but there were absolutely no pavements (sidewalks) to walk on making it all quite dangerous; it just shows how little the people around here walk.
In the hotel we spent a couple of hours ironing all our patches (from all the places we have been) onto our Tshirts in preparation for wearing them tomorrow on the next leg of our journey. And having repacked our bags a couple of times we now have our luggage sorted with the correct weight in each bag and no items that might get confiscated in our hand luggage.