If you’re in an RV, it’s relatively inexpensive to camp on the beach in Port Boliver just a short (and free!) ferry ride south of Galveston.
As you drive to the area, you’ll start to see a shift from the mainland houses to those out near the water, which are all on stilts as high winds and high tides during hurricane season are no joke!
This area was also great for bird watching.
As you’d expect, you can find great seafood restaurants. We grabbed lunch at the Stingaree Restaurant and Marina, a popular spot on the Bolivar peninsula, before taking the ferry back into Galveston for the afternoon.
Galveston, like San Francisco, is situated on a peninsula with the ocean (in this case the Gulf of Mexico) on one side and an inland bay on the other. The area skirting the gulf-side beach is typical of a few California beach towns – tons of restaurants with outdoor dining, places to buy swimwear and rent gear, a long pier with carnival rides and games called the Pleasure Pier, a walking/biking/Segway path running along the beach, and plenty of water-related fun (SUP, kayaking, fishing, etc).
For the family, Galveston’s Moody Gardens is a large complex made up of an aquarium pyramid, a discovery pyramid and a rainforest pyramid. There is also a Railroad Museum in town.
If you’re more interested in history and the arts the bay-side of Galveston has the central downtown with its historic Strand District as well as the Texas Seaport Museum that’s home to the tall ship, Elissa, built in 1877, an old orphanage called the Bryan Museum that now houses art from the American West and an 1894 Victorian Opera House.
We spent our day in Galveston in the Strand Historic District checking out the cafes, antique stores, boutiques, and dining.
We also walked through the historic downtown neighborhoods which I absolutely fell in love with! There are gorgeous Victorian homes in this area of all shapes and sizes – a mini-San Francisco, but without all the hills. The homes are less than half the price and have better landscaping, many with wonderful wood sculptures fashioned from the stumps of oaks which succumbed to hurricane flooding in the 1980s but, strangely, some websites claim their violent crime rate per 1000 residents is higher than San Francisco’s, plus, they have the potential for hurricanes. I took 42 pictures of homes, which I promise are not posted below. Instead, here’s a sample.
Galveston would be a great weekend getaway and checked a couple of our retirement boxes but climate and culture are a couple of question marks that have us continuing our search. .
