We caught a plane out of Salt Lake on promisingly mild Monday afternoon, and when we arrived in San Antonio early Tuesday morning, we were sweltering in these sweaters. 85 degrees. All. Week. Long.
Unretouched documentation of my sleep-in Tuesday morning hair. It's a gift, really.
Our hotel was right on the Riverwalk, Texas' most visited tourist feature. Meh, no shame there. We were tourists. At least I was. Terisa's days looked like the inside of a conference center.
The Alamo was to be remembered.
After I remembered it the first time, I went back so Terisa could remember it, too. It is a big deal in Texas history. I remember reading a book about it in the third grade.
The woman in the background was from Louisiana, and insisted on having crawfish for dinner after a trip to the SA temple. This is the good doctor, getting a first look at her two pounds of the junior lobsters.
Here was the detritus bucket. Turns out crawfish are about 90% inedible, and you burn more calories getting the little chunk of tail flesh out to eat. But they tasted good--certainly much better than their muddy little brothers caught at East Canyon.
The Riverwalk is a nicely designed loop of shallow canals with hotels and restaurants on the banks. It is a happening place. If you are a tourist. Which we were. It was still winter in Texas, which really only meant that the deciduous trees hadn't leafed out, yet.
I had a pretty good burger here at Charlie Wants a Burger. Charlie is evidently a dog. But the burgers were solid, even if they had fritoes on them. Crunchy!
As is my habit, I found some local museums. This is the McNay, a modern art museum out on the edge of the city, said to have 20,000 items, but I only counted about 250. I missed the opening of a special Monet/Matisse exhibit by about a week.
I did catch this contemporary item: a sculpture of "found items." A lot of shoes and chunks of metal. My kind of museum.
Also, for some reason, this El Greco caught my imagination.
Next I went to the Briscoe Museum of Western Art. The sculpture garden was delightful, and everything reminded me of Remington.
They had some western-themed paintings, and I'm kicking myself (har!) that I didn't get a picture of the 50 spurs.
This painting is aptly titled, "And Stay Off."
I also got on the San Antonio Mission Trail, a National Historical Park comprising the first five missions in the area. The "queen" is the San Jose Mission.
Here is a picture of the church complex across about two football fields of grass surrounded by a ten-foot thick wall. The natives that survived measles and the smallpox were domesticated here.
And here is a picture of an entrance through the ten-foot thick wall.
San Jose Mission had a nice, working reproduction of a water-powered grist mill. Well, it was interesting to this mechanical engineer, anyway.
In an act of sheer cultural bravery, Terisa violates the Puritanical rule (veggies before dessert, chores before play, meat before pudding) and has her banana pudding dessert as an appetizer. It was a fine idea.
It was such a fine idea that we continued it into subsequent meals. Here, we had ice cream before street tacos.
And to end the tale, here we have literally shopped until I dropped.
Coming back to SLC, with its lows in the teens and a string of snowstorms on the horizon was definitely a shock to our warmed cores. But it is home, and we love home.
