People are posting “Galveston stories”, so here’s mine. I’m a Southern California girl, born and raised. Beaches, palm trees, green, wet winters, brown gold, dry summers–that’s what I grew up with. Every summer my family would camp in the mountains and body surf down at San Clemente or Laguna. Then, at the tender age of 17, I went off to college in rural Iowa. Not only wasn’t there fast food for fifty miles, they had a one-hundred year winter there my Freshman year. And, it turns out, snow doesn’t just fall magically on December 1st and then disappear New Year’s Eve, the friggin’ stuff stays and storms and piles up until well into April. And sometimes it arrives in October!
That’s just wrong.
Well, anyway, I put up with that and the total lack of KROQ for four years (and by my senior year of college I was walking through the snow in sockless tennis shoes), and then after graduation I headed off to graduate school at Rice University in Houston.
Houston had palm trees. Houston had green, wet winters (sometimes I had to scrape ice off my front windshield), Houston had a gay community and decent college radio.
And then there was Galveston. I didn’t get down there much, but I remember the first time I did. My girlfriend stayed up on the sand while I waded into the water. I stood there, the waves crashing over my knees, and I cried.
It wasn’t home, but it was the next best thing.
Be safe, Texans!
Author Nancy E. Shaffer 
The first time I went to Houston there was an ice storm. Houston drivers on icy roads have to be seen to be believed.
The thing I remember about icy weather and Houston was it was the one place I’ve lived where I had to get my front windshield replaced at least twice (maybe three times??). You get pinged by a small stone thrown by a truck on the freeway, it puts an itty bitty dent in your windshield, and come winter, a long, thready crack starts out from the dent and travels across the glass on its own meandering path. Something about cold and heat interacting. It’s been so long since that happened to me I’ve forgotten the physics of it.