Easter doesn’t appear to be a big celebration here in the US. Normally its not much of a holiday for the school kids by UK standards, as they have only Good Friday and Easter Monday off. This year in Houston we are still feeling the effects of Hurricane Ike so Easter Monday is a normal school day, to make up for time lost in September when there was no power.

Another noticeable difference between the UK and US Easter holiday is the lack of large chocolate eggs. You can get chocolate eggs (including imports from the UK) but its clearly not a big thing. What is big, however, are the chocolate bunnies.

And so with at least one day off there was time to go to the beach at Galveston, just 80 or so miles south.

On the way to Galveston, it was only fair to call in and see how the Kemah Boardwalk had recovered from Hurricane Ike. The Boardwalk is an entertainment centre with restaurants and amusements on Galveston Bay. Its owned by Landry’s, a Texas company who also own, amongst other places, The Golden Nugget Casino in Las Vegas.

Right after the hurricane hit, the Kemah Boardwalk looked like this:

Now, six months later, things are pretty much back to how they were:

But how would Galveston itself look six months on?

Well some places were still closed:

But a few streets further inland from the beach it was as if nothing had happened:

Down on the beach a lot of work had gone into restoring things like this:

To this:

Yes, all those rocks were somehow dredged up and tossed on the beach by the storm surge created by Ike. There has been a massive project ($13.5M, the largest ever undertaken by the Texas General Land Office) to restore and widen beaches by 200 feet using more than one million cubic feet of sand dredged from the east end of the island.

That’s good news for those of us who like to go to the beach...

[Thanks to Captain Oblivious for some of the above pictures]