On day four of our trip, we headed into Galveston — which is funny, as I have been referring to this entire trip as the Galveston Trip. Turns out we’ve been 70 miles southwest of Galveston. My apologies to any would-be assassins who have been wandering around Galveston looking for me.

There comes a point in every vacation where you realize you’ve had enough. For us, that time was approximately 7:04am, Thursday morning. Our original plan involved getting up Thursday morning, driving 70 miles northeast to Galveston, spending the day there, driving back 70 miles southwest to our cabin, hanging out at the beach one last night, and heading for home Friday morning. By Thursday, we realized we’d had enough of the beach. 70 miles northeast put us 70 miles closer to home, so the decision was made to load up the van, drive to Galveston, spend some time there, and leave for home from there.

When Mason was two, maybe three, I taught him to pee outside. Teaching a boy to pee outside is a lot like teaching a dog to pee outside. You say, “pee,” and they do. Not much teaching involved. Teaching a girl to pee outside is a lot more difficult. Actually, that’s not true — teaching a girl to pee outside without peeing all over herself is the difficult part. On a wooded driveway somewhere between Quintana Beach and Galveston, Morgan managed to pee all over herself, her shorts, and managed to fill her shoes in the process.

Galveston was completely different from Quintana Beach. Galveston had blue/green ocean water, as opposed to the brown and oily water we’d previously seen. The beaches were bustling with activity, and the town looked like what we had imagined a beach town would look like, versus Quintana/Freeport’s “poor” motif.

Our first stop (which turned out to be basically our ownly stop) was Moody Gardens, home to half a dozen touristy things. One of those things was an aquarium.

The kids really enjoyed the penguins, sharks, and manta rays. Mason also really enjoyed the different skeletons (penguin, dolphin, seal) that the museum had on display.

After the aquarium, we hit Moody’s 3D IMAX theater. We had hoped to see “Monsters of the Deep” but due to a scheduling conflict we ended up seeing some crap about the Grand Canyon. Morgan was fidgiting the entire time and the rest of us were bored. We ended up leaving early and driving around the island, looking for a place to eat. We ended up at Tortuga, which is Spanish for “turtle”.

Lunch was good, and the daqueries were great. Never underestimate the power of alcohol after spending a week with two kids in a 250 square foot cabin.

Even though we kept open the option of staying the night in a Galveston hotel, by that time everybody was worn out. We hopped into the van one last time, our bellies full of Tortuga goodness, and started driving north. This turned out to be a really stupid plan as we hit Houston around 4:30pm and spent an hour and a half inching through their rush hour congestion. Dumb. We hit Dallas a little after 8pm and hooked up with Jusin and Les for some Steak and Shake. Everyone loved the shakes. The final leg of our tour launched just after 10pm, and we arrived back home at 2am exactly.