Galveston

This morning I fed my darker interest in disasters by visiting the Texas City Museum. Newly renovated and reopened, the museum covers the history of Texas City (including the privateer James Campbell, see: http://www.wtblock.com/wtblockjr/james.htm) and has an entire room dedicated to the Texas City disaster, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_Disaster, which I talk about in my General Chemisty courses when I discuss ammonium nitrate. I got a better feel for some of the details and scale of the incident. I saw the anchor memorial and caught a glimpse of the battered ship propeller memorial. I sent Karen and the girls to a park to play, saving money and keeping them from getting too creeped out. We then traveled to Galveston to stroll the seawall beach area and pick shells (we saw sea anemones and jellyfish, too). After that we caught a free ferry ride across Galveston Bay and back (thanks to Karen's excellent research) and saw dolphins cavorting in the water (note two in the foreground of the pic with the SS Selma shipwreck, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Selma). The ferry ride and seeing the dolphins was probably the high point of the day. In the early evening we traveled to the San Jacinto Monument - nice, but arrived too late go up or to visit the battleship Texas (plenty of mosquitoes, though). Throughout the day, I got a good view of the jaw-dropping size of the petrochemical industry in the area (note background of pic with shipwreck).