San Antonio

Warning: This is going to be a long post, so you may want to come back when you have more time to read :)

After Jody got back from his trip to Denver on Monday, the 21st, I had planned a spur of the moment family trip to San Antonio. The company I work for is really great - very laid back and casual. The president of the company I work for lives and has another company in San Antonio and every Wednesday he flies the company plane in to our local airport and then flies back on Friday afternoons, so we caught a ride when the plane would be empty (I didn't want the kids to be bothering my boss). It was the greatest thing - a trip that would have taken us 5 hours driving only took 1 hour. We took off around 6:50 am and landed in SA at around 8:00 am with the rental car waiting for us to load up our stuff. The only problem with our trip was that Dolly (the storm) was on its way. The pilot asked after we landed if we could see Dolly off to the left and I said, "Dolly Parton?!" - Oh my, I am so stupid sometimes - Jody had a good laugh with that one.

Anyway, we got out our trusty maps and followed the signs to the zoo. On the way, we stopped to eat breakfast and at the end of that I was changing Shane's clothes because he spilt chocolate milk all over them - oh well, we just go with the flow. The weather was perfect for the zoo - cloudy and breezy. I highly recommend the San Antonio Zoo. The animals are so close and the kids loved it. Outside of the zoo is a great park (I think it's called Brackenridge Park ??) and they have a train ride that runs through it, so we rode on it - it was fun. After that we checked into our room and rested a while and then got dressed and went down to the riverwalk. Of course when the kids saw the tour boats floating down the river, they wanted to go. So... we did. It was very interesting to hear about the history of the riverwalk and all the old buildings that surround it. Jody and I were in awe about how much we were able to do in one day and joked about how we rode in a plane, train, and automobile AND a boat. :)

Now Thursday was a different day. I am going to try and stay positive, but Hello Dolly - Goodbye Sea World. Thursday was going to be our Sea World day, but God had a different plan. It started out good - it was sprinkling when we entered the park and all the reports we heard said that it would clear out by lunch time. So we hit the indoor shows until it did. We saw the 4-D pirate show which the kids did NOT like and the wonderful Shamu show, and then the bottom fell out. After that, it would come and go - heavy rain, light rain, heavy rain, light rain. The only good thing about the rain was that the park was not crowded at all. We were the only dummies that would not give it up. Finally they closed the park down around 1:30 and then we stood in line the rest of the time trying to get our money back because we didn't want to take a rain check ticket and come back on Friday since we couldn't be there all day. So, after they asked what shows we were able to see, they prorated it and gave us 87% of our money back - yeah! After we got back in the car, I noticed I had missed a call from my mom, so I called her back and she said that my cousin Carla was in San Antonio with her family. They were at a gun shooting contest for her boys, so we went out to visit them since I hadn't seen them in so long. The boys had really grown!

Friday was a much, much better day. We went back down to the downtown area and riverwalk. We went to a children's museum that Savanna and Shane just had a blast playing in. They had all kinds of educational and fun things for them to do. I think they could have stayed there all day, but we headed on over to the Alamo. What a great history lesson there. Savanna was actually interested in learning about what happened there and we tried to explain it to her in a way that she would understand. Then we went over to the Buckhorn Museum and restaurant and spent the rest of the aftenoon there (until 2:30 - our flight left at 3:00) eating lunch and going to the two museums they had inside. I can honestly say that I have never seen so many stuffed animals and fish in one building - Jody just ate it up. The Texas Ranger Museum was interesting too. I didn't get to read about all the stuff like I wanted to because I was chasing kids, but we had a good time. On this day I didn't get any digital photos because my camera's battery went dead. So we purchased a throw away camera while we were there. It was funny because after I take a picture on my digital camera the kids always want to see what the picture looks like right after it flashes, so when the throw away camera flashed, Shane came running up saying "I wanna see, I wanna see" but I had nothing to show. Ah, the good ol' days of having to wait until a ROLL gets DEVELOPED before you could see what the picture looks like are over. LOL - no more suspense. Anyway, here is just some of the stack of digital photos I took of our wonderful, rained out, quick vacation to San Antonio. Enjoy.