April 5, 2007 – Goodbye, Astoria

I finally made it to Galveston a day later than I thought I was going to. Yesterday was completely rained and banked out. It took me two fucking hours just to find a branch of my damn bank! It’s a pretty big, national bank, so I can’t believe it took me THAT long to find one. Hell, I couldn’t even find one on my way out of Austin! What the fuck?!?!

But it’s alright. I survived. Hellboy survived. I went to hang out with Shawn and Sonya, so all was right in the world.

They’re awesome. I’m really sorry that I’ve lost contact with them for so long. I’m going to try to be a little better about that.

So, today I finally got to go to Galveston. I’ve been out here for a few hours now. It’s kinda cool, actually. It reminds me a lot of Durango, CO…just not THAT cool. Durango has it’s Main Street that is kind of the tourist/historic district, but it seems really organic. Here in Galveston it seems to have sprung up just to cater to tourists. There’s an “authentic” soda/coffee shop where the worker bee’s still wear the little white caps and aprons. Yeah, fun for older tourists, but for the rest of us who are looking for the real America, it’s a little cheap.

Here’s some shots from The Strand:

I walked along the Strand for about 45 minutes, then decided to go to the beach. I always forget how much I love walking on the beach. There’s something very soothing about the constant wooshing of the tide and the water running over your feet. Even the hard-packed sand is a little soothing. The beach is a great place to forget about things, actually. A lot of people think of it as a place to take walks with your girl or find a girl who is willing to get drunk and take her top off. But try going alone. As you walk along the beach problems will just kind of start to melt away as your feet hit the sand. Oh, they’re right back there when you get back to your car, but it all seems better while you’re there.

I can’t really say anything that hasn’t been said/written/sung/semaphored, so I’ll just say that, if it weren’t for the constant threat of hurricanes, the beach would be an amazing place to live. I could totally be Jimmy Buffet. Too bad I don’t like parrots more.

So I walked along the beach for just about two hours. And in that time I figured something out about Galveston beaches: there are plenty of No Swimming signs, but they forgot the ones that say, “Shittiest Beach In The World.” Now, I don’t have a LOT to go on here because I could count the beaches I’ve been to on thumbs. But just considering the amount of trash I saw, I can’t imagine that there are very many that are a lot worse. A lot of the businesses were closed, too, which was weird.

But like sex and pizza, even bad beaches are pretty cool, so I loved it by the end. The only thing I didn’t love was the hour long search for food. There were plenty of sit-down restaurants. Even a Jack In The Crack and McCrapald’s. But I wanted just a walk-up fish taco place or something like that. There was one, but it was closed. I thought those things would be every fuckin’ where. No such luck.

So, back to the Strand with me. I finally found a place that I thought I could eat at. Sure, it wasn’t a walk-up type place. I had to order and sit down and blah, blah, blah. But the fish tacos were fairly inexpensive and pretty damn good. (For the record, the place is called Yaga’s.) I scarfed the tacos down and came to a little coffee shop I had noticed earlier to use their interweb so that I could write and post this.

No such luck on that, but the Milky Way mocha thingie is pretty good. I’ve ingested more coffee today than I have in a long, long time, actually. (I got some at the aforementioned soda shop. Pretty damn good cinnamon mocha.) And it’s nice to come to a place where everybody knows everybody else. Not to mention the fact that they were listening to the album that I started my trip off with, The Grateful Dead’s American Beauty. I ain’t no Dead-Head, but that album is pretty amazing. To me it’s all about freedom and breaking away from the everyday. It’s very mellow and beautiful. I highly suggest it to anyone trying to make a change in their life.

Besides, “Truckin’” is a great song.

I took the road slightly less traveled on the way down here. Highway 3 used to be the only way to Galveston, but now they have IH-45. Screw that. I went the old way. It’s a little slower and has some lights, but it’s a cool road. It wasn’t as “old Houston” as I was hoping, but still better than passing everything by on a freeway.

That’s all I got for now. Maybe, if I ever find a place to ship this off to the website, you’ll actually be able to read this.