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It was warm under a sunny sky when we got back to Garland Saturday. Our return was delayed by a day due to icy conditions in Houston Friday morning when we originally planned to start home from Galveston. The sensible thing to do seemed to be to hunker down and not take our chances on the icy roads, so we booked another day in the hotel and settled down to make the best of it. As planned, we had visited some of the attractions Tuesday and Wednesday, both of which were pleasant days. The only time we ventured out Friday when it was cold and windy was for dinner Friday evening.
Galveston was hit pretty hard by hurricane Ike in 2008 but had done a remarkable job of cleaning up, in our view. Several of the attractions we visited, and I guess the whole town, had been under six to eight feet of water at the height of the storm surge. A number of trees the storm snapped off were converted to works of art, where there was enough wood to work with. The railroad museum, which encompasses the original terminal building, had been restored so that one wouldn’t know it had been wrecked by Ike without being told. Many of the places we visited had marked the high water mark somehow. In the aviation museum a large American flag showing dirt from the water about half way up was left where it was on the wall to mark the high water. In the railroad museum terminal building the high water mark, a line painted on the wall, was higher than I could reach. In another building at that museum, the high water was marked by a railroad spike mounted horizontally on a plaque.
But, as I said, the mess had been cleaned up and the town was open for business. However, it being the low season, there wasn’t much going on. We had no trouble getting a table without a reservation at the nicer restaurants we dined at. As it turned out, our favorite restaurant, the one we started gravitating to, was a sort of hole-in-the-wall type of place called Shrimp and Stuff. What its name lacked in imagination, the food more than made up for in taste. We had lunch and dinner there twice. I don’t remember having better shrimp tacos, gumbo or fried catfish, all at about a third of the price of the nicer restaurants. Not to cast aspersions on the nicer restaurants. They were good, too.
We were impressed with the aquarium and rain forest at Moody Gardens. We spent a couple of hours going through each on different days. We also enjoyed the previously-mentioned aviation museum and railroad museum. They required less time to go through and were much less expensive plus they helped fill up the day so we didn’t just lie around the hotel waiting to go eat again.
Other than the cold snap, we enjoyed our trip and also enjoyed visiting the Wylies coming and going.