Galveston, TX
Family-owned since 1911. Fresh Gulf seafood. The Seawall and Strand Historic District are walkable.
Galveston was once the largest and richest city in Texas — destroyed by the 1900 hurricane that killed 6,000-12,000 people, the deadliest natural disaster in US history. The city rebuilt behind a massive seawall and raised the entire grade of the island by up to 17 feet. The Strand historic district preserves the city's pre-storm grandeur. On approach, the contrast between the Gulf of Mexico and Galveston Bay is striking.
After the deadliest natural disaster in US history killed up to 12,000 people in 1900, Galveston built a 17-foot seawall stretching 10 miles along the Gulf coast and raised the entire grade of the city by up to 17 feet. Every building in the raised zone was jacked up and sand was pumped underneath. From the air, the seawall is clearly visible as a concrete line between the city and the Gulf. The engineering feat saved the city from subsequent hurricanes.
USS Texas (BB-35) is the last surviving dreadnought battleship in the world and the only warship still afloat that fought in both world wars. Commissioned in 1914, she shelled Vichy positions during Operation Torch in 1942, anchored four miles off Normandy on D-Day, and supported the Iwo Jima and Okinawa landings in 1945. She fired her medium-caliber guns at supposed German submarines in the North Sea in 1917 — the first time those guns ever fired in anger. Texas became the official State Ship in 1995. After 70 years moored beside the San Jacinto Monument near La Porte, decades of corrosion had her taking on 2,000 gallons a minute. In August 2022 she was towed to Galveston and dry-docked for a $75 million restoration — over 406,000 labor hours, 700 tons of replacement steel, deck planking milled from East Texas pine. She refloated in March 2024 and will berth permanently at Pier 15 in Galveston Harbor. The grand reopening is expected in 2026-2027.
NASA Johnson Space Center occupies 1,620 acres on Clear Lake, ~25 miles SE of downtown Houston. It opened in 1961 as the Manned Spacecraft Center and was renamed for Lyndon Johnson in 1973. Mission Control here has run every American crewed spaceflight since Gemini 4 in June 1965 — Apollo, Skylab, the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station, and now Artemis. The radio callsign is just "Houston." The first words spoken from the surface of the Moon were "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." The 1969-era Apollo Mission Operations Control Room is a National Historic Landmark, restored to its July 1969 condition for the Apollo 11 50th anniversary — even the wallpaper was reprinted from the manufacturer's saved rollers. Outside, Rocket Park displays the only horizontally-mounted Saturn V in the country, a 363-foot vehicle built for an Apollo mission cancelled before it could fly.
The Lone Star Flight Museum sits at the western edge of Ellington Field, on the site of one of America's last surviving WWI air training bases. The collection began in 1985 as a private holding of restored warbirds by Houston funeral magnate Robert Waltrip; it opened to the public at Galveston's Scholes Field in 1990. In September 2017 the museum moved into a new $38 million, 130,000 sq ft facility next to Ellington — closer to its airshow audiences and on an active military/commercial/NASA flightline. The flying collection includes a B-17 Flying Fortress, B-25 Mitchell, DC-3, P-47 Thunderbolt, F4U Corsair, SBD Dauntless, TBM Avenger, T-6 Texan, and Stearman trainer — all still airworthy. Rides are sold in the B-17, B-25, and T-6. The Texas Aviation Hall of Fame, established by the Texas Legislature in 1995, lives in the building. Its 100+ inductees include Bessie Coleman, Wiley Post, Howard Hughes, Eisenhower, both Bush presidents, the Tuskegee Airmen, the WASPs, the Doolittle Raiders, and astronauts Eileen Collins, Joe Engle, and Gene Cernan.