Friday: April 5
San Antonio,”Alamo, Hopscotch, Zoo
This has been a long and busy day, but a fairly successful one. My Garmin watch says that I walked 25623 steps, which I think it estimates as 12.3 miles. If this is correct, it is pretty amazing, as that would be a significant fraction of one day’s walk on the Camino, and I was a lot sorer there.
I woke up at 5:30 when Amy’s phone got a chime. I tried to get back to sleep, but then for some reason I started coughing. Eventually, around 6:30, I gave up, got up, and took a shower. We got down to breakfast about 7:05 or 7:10. I was glad we didn’t get down there any sooner, because they were not yet set up.
Breakfast was serviceable but unremarkable. It was your basic scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, potatoes, with a small selection of fruit. There was an urn of coffee, but little individual plastic containers of a creamer-like substance. They also had orange juice.
After breakfast, we went back upstairs to our room, and Amy got ready to head out to the botanical garden. We had her sign in to my Uber account with her phone, as I knew what my password was. That ended up being quicker than expected. I was doing it with Amy, because she didn’t know how it worked. We got the ride confirmed, and she hurried down to meet the car. Even so, the car arrived before Amy got there.
I went back to bed and dozed a bit until John and Pam finished breakfast. Then John texted me, and I got up, packed my fanny pack, and went to meet the in the lobby. We headed over to the Alamo.
Unfortunately, I had put the sunscreen in my backpack, and then changed my mind and used the fanny pack, so I didn’t have the sunscreen later in the day when I wanted it.
When I think of the Alamo, as I think many people do, I think of the church, but that is just a small part of the mission. We got our audio units and got in line to enter the church. The way the audio units worked was that you would enter a number and hit play. There were supposed to be signs around the mission indicating what numbers to press, but I only saw a few of the signs. Fortunately they gave us a map which also indicated what numbers to listen to where.
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There was a long line going around the whole inside of the church to go into the sacristy. It was terribly slow moving. We decided that it wasn’t worth the wait and bailed from the line. We looked around the church a little and then went outside to look at the rest of the mission (and listen to the bulk of the audio).
As we were about to leave, there was a small group demonstrating the loading and firing of muskets and rifles, so we stopped to watch them.
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Then we went back the River Walk, and found a Mexican restaurant where we had lunch.
Originally, Amy had wanted to have dinner at the Jardin at the botanical garden, but that was too far away, so John and Pam made different dinner reservations. Then Amy decided that the Jardin was too far away, and we were going to wing it. At lunch, we decided to see if we could boost John and Pam’s reservation from 2 to 4. I would have just called the restaurant, but John thought that it would be sort of on the way to the Hopscotch art exhibit (not really), so we walked there. When we got there, we found that it didn’t open until 5, so the trip was wasted.
We walked to Hopscotch and got in a bit earlier than our reservation. It featured a dozen or more rooms, each with a light and sound based art exhibit. Some of them were interactive. Some were interesting, some not so much. One that I found interesting had each wall covered in 3 or 4 pictures in different colors. Depending on what color light was illuminating it, you would see one of them but not (for the most part) the others. For example, under the green light you would see a lush jungle scene with big-leafed plants. Then the light would change to red, and instead of the jungle, you would jungle animals, like a tiger and elephant. At one point, it was illuminated with white light so you could see the jumble of the images superimposed on each other.
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After we finished, I texted Amy to find out her status. She had gone through the botanical garden, through the Japanese garden, and she had just gotten to the zoo. Since John and Pam had nothing major scheduled for the rest of the afternoon, I made a sudden decision, said adios to John and Pam, called myself an Uber, and went to the zoo to meet Amy.
At the zoo, it was sort of strange as there didn’t seem to be any ticket sellers. You had to scan a QR code and buy your ticket online. I don’t know what would happen if you didn’t have a smart phone.
When I met up with Amy (thank goodness for cell phones), the first thing I did was put on some of Amy’s sunscreen.
The zoo is a rather nice one, and I think we could easily have spent the whole day there. One nice thing is that in a number of places, you would go into some “indoor” exhibit (which typically looked like a rock grotto rather than a building), and then when you exited, you would be in a large aviary, without feeling that you were entering into one. This happened one time, and we saw an interesting bird on the pathway. We thought it was a wild bird, but then realized that we were in another aviary.
I got a lot of pictures, but even with the 3x zoom, my phone camera was not really appropriate for animal pictures. I could have gotten much better photos with my big camera and lens, but that would have required going back to the hotel and getting it. Doing that would have made my already short zoo time a half hour shorter. I figured that it was better to have more time there rather than better pictures.
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We got to the far end of the park by about 5. I was telling Amy that we needed to be heading back soon, but then it became very obvious. Apparently the zoo closes at 5. We had to walk pretty much the length of the zoo to get back to the main entrance. There was still at least a quarter or third of the park that we hadn’t seen yet.
I called another Uber (which is amazingly fast and convenient, at least in the city). In the city, the time between ordering it and it arriving was about 2-4 minutes, but out at the zoo, we had to wait about 10 minutes for the car to show up (although we could watch the car’s progress as we waited).
We got back to the hotel at 5:45, and we arranged to meet John and Pam in the lobby at 6. Our phones were fairly low in battery due to lots of pictures, but we didn’t have much time to charge them.
We went down, met up with John and Pam, and walked over to the restaurant. We didn’t have an outside table this time, but we did have a view of the water. This was a fancier meal than any we’ve had so far.
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After a mellow dinner, Amy wanted to visit the Tower of the Americas. John and Pam went back to the hotel, while we walked to the tower. The stroll was very nice. It was past sundown, and things were lit up in an interesting manner. We eventually got to the tower, where we found that they were essentially full and selling no more admissions for the rest of the day.
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So we walked back along the end of the waterway and found our way to the Alamo (after stopping to get a small vanilla shake). As advertised, the Alamo was very closed.
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We then proceeded to walk back to the River Walk, and then back to the hotel. I’m writing this up before going to bed, and I won’t be hitting the sack until about 11:30. As I said, a long day.