Island Adventure Date

This week we've had beautiful weather on the island - the sun has been shining with hardly a cloud in the sky, and the temperatures have been in the high 60s and low 70s with a gentle breeze.  Yesterday was the perfect day to unlock the bicycles and explore Galveston  (Bucket List 1!) - we've lived here a year, and we are still finding new places to go and new things to see!  So we left the apartment at about 2:00 in the afternoon without really a plan in mind, just time on our hands and a little extra spending money in our pockets.

The first place we went was the Galveston Cemetery on Broadway (the main street in Galveston), which is really six cemeteries all built side by side.  Each cemetery is for a different body of faith - there's a Catholic cemetery, Jewish cemetery, Episcopalian cemetery, and so on.  Some of the tombstones date back in the 1800s, and if you're lucky, you'll come across a soldier from the Texas War of Independence or a well-known name in Galveston.  While we were passing through the Episcopalian cemetery, looking at the mausoleums, a man approached us and asked us if we were looking for anyone in particular.  It turns out that he and his wife are cemetery tour guides.  He gave us a little background on the cemetery, and then he showed us inside a building called the Cemetery Sexton's Building.  It was once where bodies were stored in their coffins prior to being buried, as well as the groundskeeper's office.  It has fallen into disrepair over the decades, but still standing and can house twelve bodies at a time.  I was really scared to go in - I don't make it a habit to meet strangers in graveyards and follow them into rooms where dead people are locked away until they are buried!

Next we rode over to the old orphanage on 1315 Moody Street.  It was built in the 1880s by a man named George Dealey.  It's absolutely beautiful, and it has survived both the Great Storm of 1900 and Hurricane Ike.  It's a shame that it's no longer in use.  It's listed for over $1,000,000 as a five bedroom home with seven bathrooms and a six car garage.  We think it would make an amazing museum or hall for special events.  I hope one day someone will buy it, and that we'll get to walk into the inside.  The gate is locked, so this picture is as close as we could get.

We were pretty thirsty and getting hungry by this point, so we headed over to Pier 21 to catch a Happy Hour snack at Nonno Tony's.  It was our first time to go, and it certainly won't be our last!  We guzzled down water and lemonade and shared a $4 pepperoni pizza.  It was amazing - best pizza on the island for sure.  Brent and I love to talk about all the things we'll do "one day when we have money," or in other words, two incomes and not yet children.  Eating out is at the top of our list!  Until that day, though, we'll keep hunting for really good Happy Hour food deals. (Bucket List 8!)

After refueling on greasy, carb-loaded deliciousness, we took Harborside down to catch the ferry.  Being married to a future marine engineer means that every time we go down this street requires a stop to look at all the ships and the boats.  Brent tells me about the purposes and abilities of the different types of ships, and he comments on old shrimp boats that are family legacies passed from generation to generation.  Then we add having a family sailboat to our wish list for"one day when we have money" and go on.  Same conversation, just different days. For now we have our rusty, hand-me-down bikes and we smile thinking about our dreams together.

We caught the ferry just in time for what Brent calls "the sunset cruise, courtesy of the Texas Department of Transportation."  It was really busy - Spring Break is the beginning of tourism season on the island, and the tourists love to hop a free ride on the ferry in hopes of seeing dolphins.  The line to get on the ferry doubles, maybe triples, leaving some waiting almost an hour to taxi across to Bolivar Peninsula.  I'm sure that the commuters going home to Bolivar hate this time of year.  We definitely get frustrated with all the added traffic and competition for parking, but tourism is the life-blood of the island's economy so, in a way, it's good to see them all back.

When we got back to the island from Bolivar, it was getting dark, our legs were sore, our bottoms ached, and we had worked up an appetite.  We headed over to Zack's Mac Shack on Post Office Street, a new restaurant on the island that we've been excited to try that serves different types of macaroni and cheese. (Bucket List 8 again!) Brent ordered Mac and Cheese Shrimp Scampi and I had Macaroni and Cheese Balls.  Those are the Mac-N-Cheese Balls in the picture on the left - it's macaroni rolled into a ball, breaded, and fried.  It was absolutely delicious and just what we needed to peddle the last few miles home.

By the way, we do not recommend riding a bicycle or walking home in the dark on the island - it's amazing how the island scene changes once the sun goes down and the moon comes out.  The cemetery, the orphanage, the old abandoned buildings, and the dark alleys all seem haunted with danger lurking around every corner.  We laugh and joke that it feels like we're living in an episode of the Walking Dead - it really does - but it's both heart-breaking and frightening to see the homeless, the crackheads, the dealers, and the prostitutes standing on the street corners and outside the gas stations, walking aimlessly across the street or riding bicycles without any regard to oncoming traffic.  We peddled as fast as we could to get home, despite our tired legs and aching backs--next time, we'll try and make it home before dark because that was not a fun ride!

So that was our adventure date yesterday!  We were out from 2:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. and we rode 14.5 miles overall!  (We're dorks - but we were proud to calculate that.)  We love island life - old cemeteries, abandoned orphanages, obnoxious tourists, sketchy night scene, and all.  I'm really going to miss Brent over the summer - he's got a 90 day cruise from mid-May to mid-August coming up - so I hope that we can have many more weekend adventures between now and then!