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Thursday: April 4
Boston to San Antonio,First Impressions
The Eclipse 2024 Adventure begins.
We are sitting in Logan Airport, waiting to board. I didn’t sleep well last night, and we got up at 5am, so I’m a bit tired. We have about a half hour before we start boarding.
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We had a fairly uneventful flight. There was no service due to the threat of turbulence. I dozed for most of the short (~1 hour) flight.
We are now in Newark getting ready to board. It looks like Amy lost her Kindle somewhere between the plane and getting to this terminal. I would be surprised if we ever see it again. Amy is currently looking for a paper book to occupy herself.
Note to self: next time bring the lightning to audio adapter. I need that if I’m using the Bose headset with the phone.
This is another 100% full flight, so there may or may not be space for our carry on. Mine is essentially all camera stuff. Hopefully I can keep it.
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The second and longer flight was also uneventful. We had no problems stowing our luggage in the overhead bins. This plane had a screen in the back of the seats, so I didn’t need to use my phone or my wireless ear-buds.
The flight magazine suggested that on flights at this time and of this length, that they would provide a lunch, but they were only giving us snacks. I got a burger and Amy got a cheese board for a fee.
I watched Everything Everywhere All at Once, which was rather strange. Then I watched the first half of The Zone of Interest. That was also strange. It featured the family of the commandant of Auschwitz living a fairly normal life right outside. It was strange to see the juxtaposition of their living a fairly normal life with the sounds coming from the other side of the wall. It wasn’t that they seemed “evil” or didn’t know what was going on. It is just that they saw nothing wrong with it.
We landed, and got our bags. We were lazy and took a taxi to the hotel. An Uber would have been cheaper, and the bus a lot cheaper, but the taxi was quick and easy.
We checked in at the hotel and then checked in with the tour company. Today we have clear blue skies—the sky that I was hoping to have on Monday.
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We went down and wandered along the Riverwalk. It is really a nice oasis away from the city (which is literally all around it). We took the river barge tour, which was sort of like Disney’s Jungle Cruise—full of some information and some bad jokes.
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We found a Mexican restaurant that we liked, and we put our name in for an outside table. The wait time was 45-60 minutes, so we wandered along the Riverwalk and back, then waited until they called Amy’s phone.
The food wasn’t bad and wasn’t terribly expensive. Amy ate less than half of hers and I gave up about 2/3 of the way through mine. The guacamole was really good. We wanted some fancy bottled root beer, but they were out. So we each got some sort of watermelon drink, which was also really good. I think it was better than the root beer would have been.
We brought Amy’s leftovers back to the hotel room to put in the fridge, and we’re about to go to a plaza to see a laser light show.
I’ve been texting John all evening. They just got into their restaurant about the time we got back to the hotel.
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We went out to a nearby plaza, in front of the cathedral. It was only a few blocks away. There was a fair number of people there. Apparently, they had just finished doing some sort of yoga class there. We sat on the pavement, and soon the show began. I thought it was going to be some sort of laser light show, but it was more of a semi-abstract movie projected on the front of the cathedral. Halfway through, I figured out that the theme or plot seemed to be the history of Texas, or perhaps the history of San Antonio, starting with the Indians and progressing to today.
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Afterwards, we took a short stroll along the Riverwalk, then we met up with John and Pam in the hotel lobby to go over plans for tomorrow. They had some games there, including one sort of like table-top shuffleboard. The “pucks” were metal and seemed to slide over the wood with incredibly little friction. I have no idea how they pulled that off.
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