After a day in the air with our (now) good friends SouthWest Airlines, we touched down in Houston for the final leg of our stay.

Despite weighing in as the fourth-largest city in the United States (with a city population well over two million), Houston is not really known as a tourist hot-spot, with business the biggest draw bringing people to the city.

But Houston is trying to change all that - with good reason.

For scratch away at the surface and this Texan hotspot has plenty to offer to visitors.

And we go to sample plenty of that, with two days packed to the gills with sight-seeing.

Saturday was all about the Museum District, a short ride from Downtown and which very much has a European vibe.

Laid-back, spacious and with great weather to boot, the District plays host to, among others, the Museum of Fine Art, the Natural Science Museum, the Children's Museum and Houston Zoo.

And these are no run-of-the-mill attractions either, with the Natural Science Museum containing a host of stunning dinosaur exhibits, while the Zoo continues that theme by having Komodo Dragons as one of their highlights.

The area is enclosed by Hermann Park which also has a boating lake and plenty of eye-catching statues, and it is incredibly easy to lose yourself in its surroundings.

The evening was spent at Minute Maid Park, the home of the Houston Astros baseball team.

If American sports is your bag, then Houston could be your dream location, with the Astros (baseball), Texans (football), Rockets (basketball) and Dynamo (soccer) all playing major-league professional sport in the city.

But, after all that, the real thrill was still to come - with Sunday's trip to NASA's Space Center.

We were there for a solid five hours and still did not get to enjoy everything this intergalactic delight had to offer.

The Center has the perfect mix of entertainment and intellect as, for example, the 90-minute tram tour which takes you to Mission Control, the Astronaut's training facility and the now-retired Saturn rocket is offset by a wealth of children-friendly exhibits.

It is near-impossible not to be swept away by the sheer majesty of it all, and our heads were literally buzzing when we had to eventually prise ourselves away from the place.

Little wonder that the Space Center is Houston's number one attraction, but as we found out, the Texan city has much more going for it than that.

And that was pretty much that, with Monday's flight set to return us to the no-doubt misty British shores once again.