I spent Thanksgiving week in Galveston, Texas, where my in-laws live. It was an interesting week in many respects -- but for the purposes of this blog, it's probably best to focus on the, er, outdoors parts.

One day, we took a walk along the harbor near The Strand, a revamped part of old Galveston that actually reminded me of a lot of old shore towns, except much bigger. These beautiful old buildings were redone, and now they're touristy shops. Down by the water, we saw white and brown pelicans perched on the rocks. And out in the water sat four huge oil platforms, with ships next to them.

I don't exactly understand all the mechanics of oil drilling -- on my next visit, maybe I'll go to the little museum next to the platform and learn about it -- but I was so disappointed I forgot my camera because I have never seen anything like this before. These cement platforms, just sitting in the water, with huge ships next to them. My brother-in-law tells me that the boats are going ever deeper into the bay to get the oil, which is shipped all over the place. We saw one of the ships said "Halliburton" on the side but we couldn't make out where the other ones were from.

Galveston Bay seems a lot more industrial than the Chesapeake Bay, even more so, I would say, than Baltimore, with its Lehigh Cement and the few other factories that remain. From a distance, it's oddly beautiful to look at, but I do wonder how their crabs and oysters appear to be doing so much better than ours with all of that industry...maybe they have fewer people? There sure did seem to be a lot of development in suburban Houston....

And speaking of Turkey Day, Angus Phillips reminds us that it's not too soon to start thinking about Christmas, and that great wild goose he's going to eat.

I admit I have only tried the bird once -- it was on a sail from Annapolis to St. Mary's, and it was jerky, and it was not necessarily the thing you most want to eat when your stomach is already queasy. But when I woke up in St. Mary's after a rough night at sea, that goose jerky hit the spot. As the captain told me, it was just killed a couple of days before. So it was very fresh jerky...if that isn't an oxymoron.