Bacliff is the next town up the shoreline from San Leon and it is even less concerned with impressing you. Noah’s Ark sits on Boulevard Street with a palapa bar out on Galveston Bay, and it books live music with no cover, which is a sentence that has become rare. A palapa is a thatched roof on posts, which is exactly the right amount of building between a person and the bay. This is the upper Texas coast at its most unbothered: mud-brown water, brown pelicans, a container ship crawling along the horizon, and a band setting up while the sun goes down. Locals treat it as the neighborhood bar that happens to be on the water. Take the hint and do the same.
