Are you looking to avoid being front row to the greatest sacrilege in culinary holiday cooking, the fried turkey? Or you may just dread having to come home to that high school boyfriend/girlfriend that you promised to love for the rest of your life, only to announce that you have found the joys of casual dating? If so, consider a four-day weekend at Galveston State Park.
The state park is a little over an hour drive from campus and boasts unspoiled beaches, camping, hiking, fishing, and bird watching. Here you can catch crabs that you don’t need to go to the Wellness Center to leave behind.
The state park is over 2,000 acres and has some of the best camping you will find near Houston. Unlike Thanksgiving where family members will wonder how in the world you could get that tattoo. As for the park, the best part is beautiful undisturbed beaches that are not filled with trucks, grills, and fishing poles.
Hannibal and I went and camped on the last weekend of September. Busting out our ill-advised jeep
camping idea.
I would recommend that if you plan on using your vehicle as a tent make sure the top is on, otherwise about three thirty in the morning you will become mosquito bait.
However, the campsites are perfect for tent camping and campers. There is electricity, water, showers, picnic tables, grills, fire pits, and clean toilets available for $20 a night per site. If you aren’t an arsonist, you might want to stop by and get a starter log at a local store, otherwise if you know how to light up the state park has dry fire wood available.
The best part of the trip was rediscovering my wilderness cooking skills. Since Hannibal and I will not make fisherman’s monthly, we had to run to the grocery store in Jamaica Beach, but where there are lemons we made lemonade, or more precisely steak and potatoes – bone in of course for the Banana, and I can honestly say no canned yam can compete.
During the day, we tried to fish for our dinner, but all we caught were crabs, because we stopped at Oak Bayou, which is stocked for crabbers. This mistakes allowed me to believe that our lack of dinner had nothing to do with the fact that I have zero idea how to fish, or that I had to use Bass Pro YouTube videos to figure out how to cast a line, or because I ignored the advice of the two year old who was teaching fishing for dummies. I decided not to use live shrimp and used plastic bait instead. Mostly because I didn’t want the shrimps’ beady eyes judging me. Nope, we caught no fish because we were in the wrong spot.
The delusion lasted until the five-minute walk over to Como Lake where seasoned fishermen were reeling in flounder and redfish. Two hours later, I caught a tangled line that took me an hour and a half to cut out and rethread which lead to a run to the grocery store so Hannibal didn’t reenact the Domer Party that evening.
Safety First Done That Life Jacket
The following day was a day full of kayaking. I decided not to launch in Como Lake because it was a traitor the day before. So that morning, we launched out of Jenkins Bayou Access where we saw the most beautiful marsh birds, and fish that were actually jumping into our kayak. The fish did not provide dinner that night either because they just seemed to eager, or more likely because I YouTubed “cleaning fish” and threw up at the fourth bend in Jenkins Bayou, so free they went to jump for others.
If you don’t own your own kayak or fishing pole, but you are one of the students that squeal past us on campus, ringing your bike bell, then there are hundreds of acres of bike trails for you to enjoy, but the best thing that Galveston Island State Park has that your mother house doesn’t, the beach.
Hannibal and I lounged for the rest of the afternoon, well I lounged, Hannibal tried his best to swim to Florida.
A beach undisturbed by the trucks and cars parked on Galveston County beaches or the sound of traffic jams at the seawall beaches.
Let’s be honest, if you wanted to hear screaming babies on your holiday weekend, then you would have just gone home to mom’s queries of “What happened to that nice boy who helped you move in? Sweety how come you haven’t had a raise in two years?” All the while having to bite your tongue so you don’t reply “Because I get stoned before work every day”.
So why not consider spending your four days of precious freedom, in one with nature and acquiring a new skill? Like the ability to respond to this article accounting how many fish you actually caught.
The state park is only an hour south on I45, cost $5 dollars to enter, and $20 dollars a night to camp. If you don’t feel like roughing it, you can upgrade to the cabin, but let’s face it $250 a night is probably a lot less than a plane ticket home.
