Vacation Texas Beaches

July 17, 2017

We started our beach leg of vacation in Houston (only one hour from Galveston). We visited the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The highlight of this adventure was the butterfly exhibit. I’ve always wanted to visit one, but our children were just too little. It was exciting to see all the butterflies, and if you get lucky, sometimes they land on your body

Our beach house was available that afternoon and we drove over and signed for the keys, before the relatives arrived. We were able to share our vacation with my husband’s sister, Michelle and her husband and adult kids. Kurk’s Aunt Nancy, and cousins Stephanie, Brendan and Jayden stayed just down the beach. We stayed in the town of Surfside, about 45 minutes south of Galveston beach on the Gulf Coast.

Texas beaches are a little different for this Yankee. For one thing, you can drive on them! This adds to my anxiety a bit when I’m already worried about four kids in the ocean. I have a rule that the water ratio is 2:1 (two children per adult). Thus if all four children wanted to be on the beach, there needed to be two adults.

The water was in the 80s which made swimming very comfortable, and our part of the beach was very shallow. It still needed watching as weather patterns can creep up. We saw many, many water spouts (a type of water tornado). Luckily, ours were fair weather water spouts, not associated with any storms. You can read about the different types of water spouts here.

We were on the beach when this occurred which prompted my niece to grab her phone and record the shot.

To keep the children from burning to a crisp, we had mandatory inside times during the heat of the day. We played games of Candy Land, cards and Chutes and Ladders. We also enforced a nap time. One day we ventured up to Galveston for a seafood lunch (to celebrate my boys’ birthday a bit early with family) and to visit the Tall Ship Elissa and museum. The kids loved exploring the ship and seeing the interactive displays.

My kids love seafood so once a year, they get a seafood dinner of the pricey sort, usually around their birthday.

We were lucky enough to have a rare date night (thank you to Michele and Samantha for sitting). When I ordered my fish at dinner, it had a gulf wild identification tag which told me where the fish originated. It was very cool. I just typed in “gulf wild” into my search engine and then added in the tracking number and got this.