Saturday in San Antonio

On Saturday morning, we went to a sales pitch for a timeshare to get some rewards for later in the day. We do not purchase the time share - their "NOW" model of business is incompatible with our caution in making large purchases. Besides, we are still pretty mobile. After that we stopped in Market Square (sort of reminded me of the markets in China, only with a Hispanic flair) and later we used a chunk of our "reward" at the RainForest Cafe. After all that we visited San Antonio Missions National Historic Park. It was pretty cool. I enjoyed seeing the mission complexes (also gave us a good idea what the Alamo complex was like) and loved taking pictures there. The girls did the Junior Ranger program together which was cool. We attended Mass at one of the churches that evening. This was the first time the new Mass words were used, so there was a little bit of tripping on the words. After supper we headed home. It was a great couple days in San Antonio.

Black Friday at the Alamo - Part 2

After regrouping at the hotel, Katie and I watched TV, and Karen and Kris watched the Christmas parade at the Riverwalk. After they got back (and Katie was asleep) I went out and walked around. The Riverwalk gets lit up in December, and this year they switched from draping incandescent light bulb strings to LED lights wrapped around the trunk. The lights are pretty (and a good challenge for our new digital camera), but we they were mostly the same (there could be a lot more creativity). The boat parade was a bit underwhelming - we are glad we did not shell out the money to get tickets to get seats to see the parade up close. The boat parade in Seattle we saw in 2004, or even the boats at night in Guanzhou, were better. With all of its flaws, we still liked the place a lot. The lights, the warm air, restaurants, etc. probably gives it a rating of 12 out of 10 on the romance scale in my opinion.

Black Friday at the Alamo

On Friday the family and I drove down to San Antonio. Karen got a good deal on a hotel close to the downtown area so we were able to park easily. We first visited the Alamo. I had thought the event was a bunch of Texans holed up in a little church building. Granted, the old church is the only original building left standing today, but it turns out that it was part of a larger fortified mission complex, and that building (in the upper right in the picture of the battle) was not even in use as a church by the time of the Texas Revolution (it was a cannon emplacement, powder room, hospital, and shelter for the women and children). We then saw a less-frequently-visited diorama of the Alamo just off the site. The diorama presentation did a nice job of summarizing the Alamo battle. Odd little fact: the presentation is narrated by and the diorama is owned by Phil Collins (the musician) who is a huge Alamo history buff - apparently he was inspired by watching Davy Crockett Disney episodes when he was younger. There were a lot of places that I could not take pictures, but I have some here. After all this we visited the nearby Riverwalk, a loop along the San Antonio river that has fountains, shops, and restaurants. The whole place is a little bit of a tourist trap, for example, it has a Ripley's Believe It or Not museum, but the Riverwalk itself is pretty. We were surprised to see baby ducks, and we took a boat ride. Karen bemoaned the fact that the ticket price increased by 175% since she visited 15 years ago, but we all enjoyed the ride. We enjoyed it more than the Austin Ducks ride we took back in October. After briefly visiting the nearby large busy mall we headed back to the hotel to regroup.

Happy Thanksgiving, 2011

Today we played a little outside in the nice weather, watched the Packers defeat the Lions, ate a delicious Thanksgiving dinner, played a little football, and watched some holiday shows on TV.

Smokin' Turkey

The parish we joined here in Austin (St. Albert the Great) has a big smoker (it's Texas) and today (day before Thanksgiving) people bring their thawed turkeys in to be smoked all day (from 7 to 3). It's a Knights of Columbus thing. What a cool idea! I tasted a cold wing tonight - it was yummy.

Blunn Creek Volcano

Yesterday we did a little early Christmas shopping . One thing I saw for sale was a scooter that shot out sparks, which strikes me as a bad idea for sales in drought-stricken central Texas. Today Katie and I took the bus town to the south side of Austin to visit a park near St. Edwards University to see deposits from a Cretaceous volcano (that is under the main building of the university campus). It was warm and humid, but we finally found the deposits, as well as a lot of shell fossils. We also found piles of juniper berries floating in the creek. Afterward we got some cupcakes at a popular trailer in south Austin.

Some rain

Got about 0.8 in of rain and a thunderstorm today. Now there are a bunch of land snails outside enjoying the moisture.

Roadrunning

Late last week I attended a regional ACS meeting that was conveniently here in Austin this year. Yesterday Katie attended the birthday party of a friend in south Austin. I poked around the area rock hunting (and got poked by cacti) and saw a roadrunner at Goat Cave Karst Preserve. The main cave is fenced off in the hopes that bats will reestablish a population there; the other caves were pretty small. Today, Kris and Karen went to the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum and enjoyed it. Katie and I hung out elsewhere on the UT campus, like at the Texas Memorial Museum. They had a stuffed roadrunner that was much easier to photograph.