Galveston ramble: Bishop's Palace and Moody Mansion

They're both worth seeing, but Bishop's Palace is more about art (in its architecture), and Moody Mansion is more about history (with its place in Galveston lore).  We are art people, and so we preferred the Palace. 

Rainy Saturday and scratch another one off the Bucket List.  I didn't feel like fighting Houston traffic in the rain, so we headed south down an empty freeway to the island.   My husband and I have both lived in greater Houston for a gazillion years but neither of us had seen this previously.  It's one of those things that fell into the "one day" category that we never got around to. 

Did I say art?!  What was this mason smoking?!  Many different unrelated styles and stones, and yet it all works together perfectly. 

We are also not very big on velvet rope, of which there is more at Moody Mansion, where the tour we took was closely led by a narrator instead of being self-guided and self-paced, as it was at the Palace.  If you have small children, the Palace is probably your better bet because they might get fidgety during the long but interesting Moody discourse. 


For all their wealth, the Moody family didn't make a huge spectacle of their living quarters.  The third floor of the mansion remains unfinished to this day because they reportedly never needed it. 

Note that you better buy your tickets early in the day for the Moody tour because it sells out. 

No interior photos to show you in this post, because photography was prohibited inside both places.  I could have spent another hour just examining the exteriors, the craftsmanship is so fascinating.

I'll go back one day for a closer look when the sun is out.  Yeah, "one day".