December 26-28 Joe and I went to San Antonio to celebrate our 6-year anniversary!
On Wednesday (the 26th), we headed out from Joe's parents to drive to San Antonio.
We're almost to downtown!
We stopped to eat a BBQ lunch at Bill Miller's BBQ. I thought it was the worst BBQ I've ever had (Joe thought it wasn't THAT bad), but they had them all over San Antonio. From the parking lot, we took these pictures of the Alamo dome (where the Aggies were playing on Saturday).
Then we checked into our hotel, which turned out to be a lot cuter than we had originally thought! We had a two night free stay, so we expected the worst, but the Downtown Holiday Inn turned out to be nice.
It also had a great view at night!
Next, we headed out to Fiesta Texas. They had "Holiday in the Park" which means that about half the park (plus the water park) was closed, but the rest was decorated with lots of Christmas lights and there were holiday-themed shows. The neatest thing about the park is that half of it is surrounded by cliffs (you can see some in the picture below).
I had printed out the rides that were open, so we were ready to hit the best ones first. It turned out to be very empty, and most of the night the only waiting we did was for the ride to stop so we could get on. After an hour and a half we had gone on all the rides we wanted to AND watched a 20 minute show (carolers). We were going to go on one roller coaster again, this time in the front car, and had three pairs in line in front of us. Once we were the next in line to get on, the ride operator (a.k.a. the high school kid wearing shorts when it's 37 degrees out) said the ride was temporary closed due to "technical difficulties." We waited, and they ran it once with no one on it. It came back, but they said they would have to shut down the ride for the night! They said it was something about the ride not being safe below certain temperatures. That's one of those times when you're glad you just avoided an unsafe situation, but sad because you were two people away from having fun! We both agreed that the best thing there was the light show - they had a bunch of lights arranged in an area and different things / colors would light up / turn off / fade along with the Christmas music. It was very well done, and very cool!
That night we shared a yummy burger at Red Robin - a place I had first gone to with Joe in California (in our earlier years). We also picked up some wine from World Market which fortunately turned out to not have a cork (otherwise we would have just had to use The Force to open it).
The next day wasn't quite as pretty, but we wanted to explore more of downtown San Antonio.
Joe had found a location and took me to
La Madeleine for breakfast - one of my favorite breakfast places.
After realizing it would be expensive (and possibly impossible) to park near Market Square, we decided to park the car back at our hotel and walk. We looked in many (nearly identical) shops and tried some tasty Mexican cookies. They also had a couple street musicians (on panflute and guitar) who weren't bad. We ended up walking to a cute Mexican food place that had tasty food (even though our waitress mysteriously disappeared, never to return... well, not that day).
We next got to visit the Conception Mission - check out the pictures: (One is of some original painting that was done inside the mission!)
That night we ventured out to the "Nationally Famous" Riverwalk. The Christmas lights were still up!
This one is us outside the Riverwalk Mall (a nice young lady volunteered to take our picture).
We had taken a trolley to get to and from downtown, which was an adventure all in itself! Finally, we went to Spaghetti Warehouse for dinner. I had grown up going to the one in Dallas for many special occasions, so it's a fun place in my book. It was funny because other than the two of us, the restaurant only had three large groups dining - each with over 20 people! Joe pointed out that we had a "Romantic" day of food - food from French, Spanish, and Italian speaking countries.
Friday morning (our actual anniversary!), we unsuccessfully looked all over for a place to eat breakfast before returning to our hotel to check out. We headed north on I-35, and found brunch at a
Shoney's.
Next we went to a disc golf course that Joe had read about. On the 16th hole, Joe threw a disc that went straight into a forest. He called a Mulligan, and threw another disc to the same spot. We went to look for them and found one pretty quickly. The other one was Joe's favorite disc that he recently traded in four older discs to get! We looked for about 15 minutes, and I thought I found his yellow disc, but it turned out to be someone else's nice disc they had lost. There was no name or phone number on the back, so it's now Joe's! We kept looking for the lost disc, and about five minutes later a father / son pair walked by and asked if we lost a disc. Joe said he had, and said he thought it was somewhere in this particular area, and the father saw it right away! It was at the top of a tall tree, so the next few minutes were spent throwing rocks and sticks at it, but it finally fell down. We were both very happy to get the disc back, and to find another one. As we were walking out of the park, we noticed this sign that tells about the park's namesake.
We warmed up in the car and drove to San Marcos. If you're female and know the area, you're probably thinking the right thing: Outlet Malls! Though we were unsuccessful in finding the jeans we needed, we found some great Christmas decorations and a wreath at Kirkland's for really good prices. We went to Taco Beuno to eat dinner, and I'm pretty sure the employees thought we were aliens. We hadn't been to one in so long, we had to ask what several things were, and changed our minds several times. There was clearly one thought going through the cashier's mind: Come on, it's just fast food. But we enjoyed it!
We made it back to College Station at a reasonable hour, so it was good to wrap up our anniversary at home.
Labels: vacation, What's Happened
