San Antonio

I am back again to the real world after an awesome little getaway weekend with Eric to San Antonio. He got here on Friday night and we went out to eat with my other couple friends Chelsea & Alfonso, and Shannon & Ian. It was so fun to pretend for a night that we were real people with the freedom to enjoy ourselves and have an evening away from school work with no worries. As you can see, we all loved it...

On Saturday morning Eric and I drove down to San Antonio where we stayed for two days. Our hotel was a block from the Alamo, San Antonio's biggest claim to fame, and a rather odd place, as we found.
The tiny lawn in front of the building is bright green, and features this plaque with a rather touching quote from Colonel Travis about the Alamo Texian's (real word- wikipedia it for further details) imminent demise. We found that though the Alamo displayed many such plaques and quotes, as well as a display on the history of the Bowie knife and a replica portrait of Davey Crockett, it was incredibly hard to find out what the actual story of the Alamo was. There was little to none in the interprative historical material department. In fact, we still don't know what the story of the Alamo is, other than the fact that a bunch of Texian's got killed including Jim Bowie and Davey Crockett. I plan on checking wikipedia for further details.

I thought it would be interesting to show shots of the Alamo that one never sees in the popular media. You know, we've all seen the front of the Alamo lit up beautifully at night. But here it is as it actually stands: with a bunch of people milling around and a snow cone stand in front. It seems so diminutive in comparison to the big city surrounding it now. It's almost unfathomable that it was once a desolate place.
I never knew that you could actually go inside the Alamo. So that was a fun surprise. The best part turned out the be the 100-150 year old graffiti on the walls. In the above picture you can see the name 'W.L. Bush.' Could it be? A relative perhaps? It is Texas after all.
The inside back wall. The whole place was filled with sand back in the day and they fired a cannon out of the door on the upper left there.

Here you can see our hotel from right behind the Alamo. It was that close.
And the back of the Alamo. Nobody ever sees that, right? You can thank me later.
On a side note- San Antonio was like a different world in a lot of respects. For one, they allowed smoking indoors. And they even had cigarette vending machines! This one was brand new and digital. Although the lady on the front appears to be looking at a jukebox. crazy.
Ok, we did go see the Alamo lit up and beautiful at night.
It is lovely.
And then we went golfing! It was like 75 and sunny all day on Sunday. We got really lucky. And it was so much fun.
(this is a practice shot- I did not wiff and miss the ball. FYI.)
Not bad at all.