Galveston, oh, Galveston – Galveston, TX [March 22-26, 2017]

On the beach at Galveston, Texas!!!

Galveston is an island, a town, a bay, and an “island time” state of mind.  It is a welcoming beach town; less schlocky and cleaner than most of the big beach towns we have visited.  It has a really interesting history, and resides next to a very industrial, petrochemical presence on neighboring islands and coastlines around Galveston Bay.

Tiki, after a swim

Portugese-Man-of-War jellyfish.

We started our stay at the beach, natch!  Our campground adjoined Stewart Beach, a wide, long public beach that was relatively empty on weekdays and wall-to-wall people on the weekend.  The sand here is very fine, powdery, brown sand.  The slope of the beach is very shallow, and the water is very shallow for a long way off the beach.  Consequently, there is a long area of waves off from the shore.  The water turns a muddy brown color as the waves pick up the fine brown sand.  It was warm and windy while we were there, warm enough to wear shorts but too windy for us to swim comfortably.  Tiki was not bothered by the wind, and swam every morning on our morning walks.

Part of The Strand

These deep curbs allow for run-off during big storms.

You may have heard about the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, described in the 2000 best-selling book Isaac’s Storm by Erik Larson.  This tragic storm flooded the island, washed away most of the buildings and killed thousands of people.  It is still the greatest U.S. natural disaster of all time, even worse than Katrina. At the time, Galveston was Texas’ most prominent deep water port.  It was an international port of trade and an entry point for immigrants.  The town had great wealth.  After the storm, the town built a seawall to protect it, and raised the elevation of the town by several feet.  However, it never returned to its former wealth and stature as a great port city.  Neighboring Houston took most of that traffic and prestige.  A few of the sturdiest stone buildings from that time remain.  Some of the others are in the old commercial district called The Strand.  Eight years ago, Galveston took a direct hit with Hurricane Ike and most of the homes were inundated with feet of water.  However, the seawall held, and more modern emergency procedures were followed, and the town did not repeat the tragedy of the 1900 storm.

The Bishop's Palace

Inside the Bishop's Palace

We visited the Bishop's Palace, an ornate Victorian home completed in 1893 for the wealthy Gresham family and used for 40 years starting in 1923 as the residence of the Catholic Bishop of Galveston.  It is one of the few buildings to survive the 1900 Hurricane.  The house is beautiful, full of amazing wood floors, marble fireplaces, and tall windows, some of them stained glass.

Oil rig museum - the Ocean Star

This is used to transport workers from the rig to a boat to return to shore and vice versa.

Oil drilling stuff across Galveston Harbor from the Ocean Star

We also visited a retired oil rig that has been set up in Galveston harbor as a museum about the offshore oil drilling industry.  We learned many things about the different kinds of rigs, and the different ways that the oil is transported from the well to the mainland for processing and distribution.  The museum unabashedly promotes the interests of the petrochemical industries.  None-the-less, it was kind of cool to be moving around on a real oil rig, and going out on the decks.

The Historic Galveston Pleasure Pier

On the Ferris Wheel

View across the island from the Ferris Wheel - do you see the cruise ship in the harbor?

Galveston is working hard to make itself a desirable beach destination.  They are renewing some of the beaches with sand pumped from a sandbar out in the Gulf.  They have a convention center and have attracted well-known restaurants to the island to supplement the local restaurants.  They also restored the Historic Galveston Pleasure Pier with amusement park rides and activities on the pier out over the water.  We rode the Ferris Wheel and had a gorgeous view of the coastline and the town.

White pelicans in Galveston Harbor - the last time we saw these guys was in the Northwest Angle of Minnesota in July.

We spent most of our time in the more developed northern part of the island.  As we were leaving, we followed the island south, stopping to have lunch at lovely Galveston Island State Park.