Photos: from Rockdale to Galveston

Driving from Rockdale, Texas, to Galveston, Texas.  It's a rainy, dreary day, and many of my pictures were total duds.  These would have been, too, were it not for my photo editor.  Every single photo has been brightened, sharpened, and had a bit of color-saturation applied to it.  And still they are somewhat dull and fuzzy.  But, ... you take what you can get, when you've never been to the location before, and just might not ever return!  😏  My pictures are not for photo contests; they're for the memories.  At least the human eye can appreciate things through drizzle and fog better than the camera can!  I've spared you the worst of the shots.

Houston! City of overpasses, stack interchanges, and oil refineries. Therefore, 'Stack City'.  We would be traveling through Houston and several of its suburbs (it has about 15) for 1 ½ hours to get to Galveston. Houston has a population of 2.313 million (according to the 2017 census) – and the Greater Houston area with all her suburbs has a population of 7 million people. 

Wow. The entire state of Nebraska only has a population of 1.929 million, and the greater percentage of those are in Lincoln and Omaha.

If you want to learn more about the classic cloverleaf, the stack interchange, the cloverleaf stack, the windmill, the diamond, the dumbbell, the dogbone, and the boomerang, check out this interesting and humorous article:
The Texanist, on Those Insanely Tall Overpasses

Houston skyline

Oil refineries everywhere

And then... palm trees!

And then... along the bay... houses on stilts! Pilings. Elevated structures. Tall houses!

Bridge over a marina

Finally, ve haff arrived: Galveston. Well, that is, as soon as we cross the Galveston Bay/West Bay George & Cynthia Mitchell Memorial Causeway, *Galveston*.

The original causeway (to the left) was built in 1912 and carried both rail and auto traffic. The auto traffic was transferred to new causeways built to the west in 1939, leaving the original bridge for rail traffic. The original route was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.

The Original Drawspan was replaced in 1987 with a new narrower Bascule Span that pivoted from the Island side of instead of the Mainland side as the original did, also the new span did not include space for a roadway, and a new service building was built on the old roadway on the island side of the channel. In 2012, the bascule-type drawbridge on the railroad causeway was again replaced with a vertical-lift-type drawbridge, allowing the navigation channel through the draw span to be widened. In 2001, the U.S. Coast Guard had declared the old span's narrow passageway to be a hazard to navigation. It was only 105 feet (32 m) wide, whereas the replacement vertical-lift span allowed the channel to be widened to about 300 feet (91 m).