Day 14 - San Antonio, Texas

Howdy folks!

Another sizzling day here in Texas. We saw temperatures of 41C/105F in the afternoon hours. You can get badly burnt just leaning against the car! Let's not get ahead of ourselves though. Have a look at this slice (or chunk, more like) of authentic, home made cherry pie! This and coffee for breakfast actually saw us through the day without lunch. It was massive!


We arrived in San Antonio at midday after a light day of driving - only three hours. It's allegedly the most beautiful and picturesque city in Texas, and so far we're inclined to agree. This was the site of the famous last stand of the Alamo, in the last days of the war between Texas and Mexico. Once again, Texas had in fact already won the war several days before the battle took place. I mean WTF nabs get teh internets already. Slowpokes. We actually went there during the day (when the shrine was open) but this night picture of the famous façade was better than the daytime pictures I got.


We spent the afternoon at the hotel. It was too hot to do anything but lounge around by the pool, plus we had some laundry to catch up on. Our room is now filled with half-dried clothes because the spin cycle didn't work properly. Oh well, one minor inconvenience in an otherwise very convenient trip ;)

We'd had a tip from an old Texan who we met in Florida that the boat rides around the San Antonio riverwalk were well worth the money. Well, he was right. After some lovely pasta at an Italian place (we're really trying to stay away from the fast food now by the way) we hopped on a tour around this famous part of town. It's the very heart of San Antonio - a horse-shoe shaped canal lined with restaurants and clubs. Not as commercial or tacky as in other places either. We had an awesome tour guide whose name I can't remember. Even though there were few actual sights, he managed to make us all laugh at even the smallest anecdotes about the local hotels. Half the fun was his Texan accent! Here's a night shot of the river:


Although I post pictures virtually every day, they're only a fraction of everything I photograph. Every night we go through the day's collection of pictures and throw out the worst of the lot, and keep the rest sorted neatly by date. At some point in a very distant future I will have cropped and optimized the ones I want to share and put them in albums on facebook. Here's a sample of the randomness that doesn't usually make it to the blog, the Hilton hotel balconies:


Tomorrow we're off on our first leg of two on the trip to El Paso. We'll be driving around 300 miles (480 kilometers) and as far as we know, there's not a whole lot to see on the way! We'll see if we have some pictures to share tomorrow :)