Saturday: April 6
San Antonio,Biking to Missions
My body seems to be in a different time zone. I slept fine, but at 5:30 my body suddenly decided that it was time to get up. It was sort of like someone threw a switch, and my body went from sleep-mode to awake-mode. I got up and took a cough suppressant to try to avoid what happened the previous night.
I think I was just falling back asleep when the alarm went off at 6:50.
The sky was a solid dark gray overcast. It did not look promising. We went down and had the same breakfast as the previous day. This morning, the coffee was even worse than the previous day’s. I ended up not drinking it.
When we finished, John and Pam had not yet arrived, so I went back up to our room and crawled back into bed. We were supposed to pick up the bikes around 10, so over text we arranged to meet in the hotel lobby at 9:30.
Amy arrived, and we lay in bed semi-dozing until the alarm I had set went off. I put on shorts, stuffed some stuff in my backpack, and we went down. We were a bit late, so John and Pam were waiting for us.
Fortunately for me, just after I ordered the Uber, John mentioned something about it spitting out. I had thought that it was overcast but dry, so I hadn’t packed any rain gear in my backpack. The Uber driver was 7 minutes away, so I dashed up to the room, grabbed my raincoat, stuffed it in my pack, and raced back downstairs. I got there with several minutes to spare.
When we got to the bike shop, I was surprised to find that we were renting e-bikes. They also provided helmets and locks (and a map). We got the bikes adjusted and set off. It was sort of spitting a bit more now, so I put on my raincoat. Unfortunately, Amy didn’t have anything appropriate.
The guy gave us directions, along the lines of take a right here, then take a left there, and then a right there, etc. I figured that I would never remember that, so I pulled it up on Google maps, and I’m pretty sure the guy and I selected the right path. So I put the phone on a handlebar mount and took the lead.
It was a little awkward, as the bike place was north of town, and the missions were south. So we had to ride along the city streets until we got beyond the downtown, and then we could pick up the bike path along the river. At one point, we were riding along a brick road, which was a lot less comfortable than asphalt.
While we were still north of the city, Google wanted us to go more towards the right, but our memories of the directions said to go left. Eventually, I ignored Google and went the way we seemed to recall, which eventually got us to the bike path.
At one point, I pulled off for one of the missions, but then we decided that this was just a park, and we returned to the bike path along the water.
We passed by a number of small dams, only a few feet high, with something that resembled a very small, very low-angle fish ladder. At one of these, I saw a guy in a kayak going or at least trying to go down one of these.
I pulled off at a sign for a mission, and after a bit of travel and a few false starts, we found the place. It was much bigger and in better shape than I expected. It was the Mission San Jose, which was the most restored of them. It was also the second one. It turned that my attempt to go to the first one had in fact been correct, but we hadn’t gone far enough (nor had we looked at the map).
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At another place, we passed a large religious procession going in the opposite direction.
My glasses were rather covered in water drops, but I was dry due to my rain jacket. At this point, the spitting had stopped.
We spent a fair amount of time at Mission San Jose. It turns out that the church there is still a functioning Catholic church, where they regularly hold Masses. They had some music playing in the background, and I was surprised to hear one of the songs that we do at my home church.
We continued to wear our bright, florescent green bike helmets, which made it very easy to find each other.
We finished there a bit after 12, and we decided that this was a good place to look for lunch. We rode out to the main street, headed in the direction of a McDonald’s, and then went to a nearby Subway. While we were eating, the sun actually came out, so we didn’t use our rain gear after that.
We continued south to the Mission San Juan. Granted that the path was pretty level, but the bikes were very easy to ride. Half the time I had it in the low setting, and half the time I turned it off. It was nice because you could cruise along with no assistance, and then get a bit of an aid when there was a hill. I could see how this type of bike would be wonderful for doing the carriage paths in Acadia. The E-assist would be wonderful when you were climbing up the side of one of the mountains.
Up to about halfway between Mission San Jose and Mission San Juan, the bike trail turned from being paved to being gravel. Even though we had fairly wide tires, it was still much more jarring. It really made us all appreciate paved roads more.
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When we finished wandering around Mission San Juan, we decided to skip the last mission (Espada), as it was not particularly restored, and we were worried about the time. We wanted to get back to the bike rental place by 4, so we could get back to the hotel and get cleaned up by the 5:00 briefing.
We started back north, and we were very grateful when we transitioned from a gravel pathway to a paved one. We turned off for Mission Conception (the one we missed on our way south). We went further this time, but we just found another park. I checked the map, we went a bit further, and then we found the actual mission. It also featured a functioning Catholic Church.
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I hadn’t brought my sunscreen, but Amy had hers, so John and I gooped up, even though it was getting on towards 3. I figured that it couldn’t hurt, even if it wasn’t strictly needed.
In the interest of time, rather than going back to the bike path, going along it a short while, and then coming back out to the major roads, we just took streets from the mission back the way we came from the bike shop. I have to say that going along the bike path was nicer than city streets.
At one point, I put the E-assist on to medium, and then I found I could put it in high gear and blast down the road with very little effort. Amy called to me, however, and said that I needed to slow down so that I didn’t lose her.
We were somewhat conservative about the time, and rather than getting there at 4, we got there at 3:30. The guy there was somewhat surprised by how little of the battery we had used. I guess most renters used more battery and less effort.
I called an Uber, and we returned to the hotel. John was impressed enough from the experience that he downloaded the app and is planning to take an Uber to the airport when we are leaving. He had been planning to take the bus back, but that meant that he would have had to have left before 7am, when breakfast started.
We got back to the hotel and got cleaned up. I was wondering why I had bothered taking a shower in the morning. They had some free cookies in the lobby, which was a welcome snack to tide us over to dinner.
We got down to the briefing, and it was somewhat disheartening hearing him talk about all the wonderful things which we had a good chance of not seeing.
After it was over (6:15), we hurried to Paesano, where we had 6:30 reservations. The River Walk was more crowded than I had yet seen it, and it moved correspondingly slower. We got there just in time, however, and we got a small table outside. I had on a thin long-sleeved shirt over my tee-shirt, which was good because even then I was almost a bit chilled. The table was rather small, but then they didn’t have a lot of space to put tables in.
There seemed to be proms going on or something, because we saw a bunch of High School aged kids dressed up in suits and gowns. We also saw a guy go by with a large yellow snake draped around his shoulders.
After dinner, Amy wasn’t motivated to hike all the way up to the tower (neither was I), so we just did a leisurely stroll around the River Walk and back to our hotel. It was a bit less crowded at this point.
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I was thinking of trying to find a coffee shop or something, but decided that it wasn’t worth the trouble.
Unfortunately, it looks like I got a little toasted today. The backs of my hands (where they are face-up on the handlebars are a bit pink, and my nose looks like Rudolf.
Tomorrow, we drive up to Waco, and then Eclipse Day should be a real zoo.