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January 2000

Texas - San Antonio

David Aaronson
2005-09-24 22:17:46

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We mentioned earlier that we'd recommend skipping the Alamo and visiting these missions instead. There are five missions in San Antonio, the Alamo being one of them. This, the headquarters of the national park and one of the best preserved, is Mission San Jose (10).

San Jose (11) was founded in 1720 and it is a few miles south along the river from the earlier mission San Antonio de Valero. San Antonio de Valero is the original name of what is now the Alamo. This is the front entrance of the church which is surrounded by stone walls (partially restored). The mission also contains a granary within its walls and at its height was home to over 300 local Indians in the courtyard area.

All five missions were built to spread Catholicism and enforce the wishes of the Spanish Empire. Agriculture was not particularly easy (and still isn't) in southern Texas. Indian attacks were also a regular facet of life, although we personally didn't even see any during our visit. :)

This is Mission San Francisco de la Espada (12), another of the five missions. This was the first mission in Texas. San Francisco is not as well preserved as San Jose. The outer wall is crumbling and missing in some sections entirely. The bell tower is called an Espadana and this is still a 'working' church. In fact, the inside looks completely out of context as it has modern carpeting, shiny new pews and so forth.

We spent New Year's Eve partially at San Antonio's festival downtown and partially at the bar at Planet Hollywood on Riverwalk. It started out as a convenient place to use the restrooms and then it turned out to have a pretty nice bar and they eventually gave us some of these exciting party favors.

We watched some unspectacular fireworks over the Tower of the Americas with some festive San Antonians (and other tourists too). We'll skip over the bit of singing we began the new year with and jump to the hotel where this picture was taken amidst more revelry. The ticker tape stuff has at this point followed us from downtown, through the ride back to the hotel and in and out of the room several times. We honestly can't remember why we're laughing here but you can probably jump to your own conclusions.

We didn't exactly get up very early on New Year's Day. In fact, it may have been somewhere around 2:00 PM when we finally left the hotel. Or it might have been later. Either way, we cancelled our tentative plans to explore hill country and instead went to visit various cemetaries in New Braunfels in search of the tombstone of David's great-grandfather. It was at one of those cemetaries where the armadillo on the background of this page was living. Later we drove into Austin and sat beneath the Congress St. Bridge for about an hour at dusk waiting for the bats to come out. They never did. So then we tried to find a restaurant which also failed as the University was still out for the holidays so there weren't many people about and not much open. Instead we just went back to San Antonio and ate there again. We left Texas the next morning.