Texas Vacation - Day Eight - San Antonio and lots of driving

 Friday April 12th was the 8th day of our vacation. This was the day that we would start driving back to Idaho. We had 3 days of driving ahead of us. And each of those days had at least one place that we were going to stop and do some sightseeing. It was nice to know that even though we were on the downward side of our vacation we weren't done yet. 

But it was also super hard to say goodbye to Galveston. We could have stayed there forever. 

I woke up before sunrise and started packing up my stuff. I had shampoo and conditioner in the shower. Makeup on the bathroom counter. Shoes under the bed. Socks kind of everywhere. 

I packed up the towels and swimming suits as best I could. They were still damp so I didn't want to back them up completely until they were dry. I took the towels out side to the motel part of the hotel and shook the sand off over the railing. The sun was about to rise as I did that. It was breathtaking to watch the sky as it gradually got lighter. I went back in the hotel room and put the swimming suits and towels in a bag and planned to let them air dry at a park later in the day. 

And then I took a picture though the window of the sunrise. Gosh this room had amazing views. 

The kids got up and we went downstairs to breakfast. Then we went back up stairs and got our stuff to take down to the car. I knew we'd need to go back up for some things, but Lydia was determined to get her stuff down in one trip. Here she is holding everything. 

Brandon packed up the car. And all of a sudden we were ready to go. We drove along the seawall. Brandon didn't want to turn the car away from the ocean yet. So I told him we could go east to Freeport and then work our way up to the interstate from there. It would add some time to our trip, but we'd avoid the crazy roads in Houston and it was worth it to see the gulf for as long as possible. 

The beach was on the left of our car and I was sitting on the right so I couldn't get great pictures of the beach. As we drove away Lydia was saying that she wanted to live in a house on the beach when she grew up. I was trying to figure out how to decorate our patio so it would look beachy without looking too beachy. 

We came to the end of the island. Here's the bay side outside my window. 

There was a $2 toll to drive on the bridge that would take us off the island. 

Here's that bridge. 

And then there was just a lot of driving. The scenery wasn't great for most of the drive. Derrick wanted to talk about the next time we'd go to Galveston. I told him I didn't know if we'd ever come back to Galveston, but that I wanted to go to California next year. I told him there were beaches in California. He liked that. (And has been talking about Disneyland quite a bit too.)

We listened to the last hour or so of Jurassic Park. The ending kind of drags on so it wasn't exactly riveting, but we'd all really enjoyed the book. 

On our way to Texas we'd had our regular seats with Derrick and Veronica in the back and Charlotte and Lydia in the middle. We decided to rotate things for the way back. Charlotte and Lydia moved to the back and Derrick and Veronica were in the middle seats. I promise Charlotte and Lydia are in the car, they were just sleeping. 

We finished the book before we found the interstate. Brandon has the Jurassic Park soundtrack on his phone. I pulled that up and we listened to it as we drove on a bunch of random back roads. We found the interstate as the music swelled into the main Jurassic Park theme. That was kind of funny. 

We drove on the I-10 to San Antonio. Our plan was to go to the Riverwalk in Downtown San Antonio. But I didn't want to just drive right into San Antonio. So I found a park on the outskirts and we went there first for a little lunch break. 

We saw another cardinal and I took a lot of pictures like this trying to take a picture of a cardinal

Let's just pretend I took this picture, okay?

Here we are hanging out at the park. We had chips, pudding, and peanut butter, nuttela, and jelly sandwiches. This was the same peanut butter, nuttella, and jelly Brandon had bought before the eclipse. 

Then we drove into San Antonio. We had a little bit of trouble actually finding the Riverwalk. The GPS on our phones just kept taking us near the riverwalk, but they weren't really good at helping us find where to park. I was like, "We came here 11 years ago when neither of us had smart phones and I don't remember ANY problems finding where to park." (I realized later that the difference was I'd looked up where to park on the official Riverwalk website and had picked out the place ahead of time.)

We eventually found a parking garage near the Riverwalk. The kids were so impressed by the parking garage. They thought it was so fun to go up the round ramps to the different levels. They wanted to park on the very top, but the top 3 levels were blocked off. So we settled for level 7. These little country kids loved looking out over the city from that high up.

I think they would have been happy with just this view as the tour of the city.

But we were here for the River walk so we went down the elevator and then down some stairs to the riverwalk level. 

We had a little meeting by the map and decided where to go.

Some of the kids weren't exactly thrilled about this afternoon walk. But I was like trust me, you want to see this.

They had to admit it was kind of cool to go under bridges like this. 

And walk near restaurants that had tables right on the side of the river. 

I was in love with all the cypress trees. They were so pretty.

We kept seeing the river boats on the water and the kids were asking for a tour. I'd told them that we were only going to walk along the river. We'd already done a boat ride the day before and I didn't really want to pay for another one. 

But . . . . . . . those boats were really fun looking. 

And . . .  who knew when we'd ever be together as a family in San Antonio again. 

And . . . we'd ridden on these boats in 2013 when I was pregnant with Veronica and the other kids were really little. That boat ride had been a little tense with all those little kids. I kind of wanted to redo the memory. 

And . . . . I passed a sign that had the prices listed and they were less than I'd assumed. 

And so when we happened to walk to the place where the boat tour started I was like, "Let's do it!"

We bought the tickets and were soon on a boat. (Which was already an improvement over our last time doing a tour here. Last time we were here was during Spring Break and there had been so many people in line for the boats.)

Here are me and Veronica together. We often end up as buddies on things like this. Charlotte and Lydia pair up, Derrick and Brandon pair up, and then me and Veronica pair up. Veronica calls us the V-team. 

I'm so glad we did the boat tour. We covered so much more ground on the boat that we would have on foot. And the boat captain had lots of good information about the city. We learned so much on that 40 minute ride. Here's a video of it. 

Like I said, I was obsessed with the trees. 

It was so fun to go under bridges. 

I want to come back here and eat at these restaurants along the river some day. 

Here I am - regretting that I didn't bring my hat. (It was still wet from playing in the water the night before.)

I always assumed that the riverwalk had always kind of existed like this. That the town had been built around the riverwalk like 300 years ago and just kept growing. But the captain/tour guide explained that the riverwalk was actually the creation of one man, Robert Hugman. He was hired by a group of women who had a vision for a horseshoe bend of the river. He designed a flood gate system to keep the water from the main part of the river from flooding the horseshoe bend. He then moved his office down there to prove that it was safe. Here's his office building. 

And here's Veronica. She had a sun burn blister on her nose and she wanted to see what it looked like. But I just think its a cute picture of her. 

We all were loving the tour. 

Here's Derrick. He loved this.

This was the area where the tour used to originate. It was by a mall with a huge indoor ropes course. The kids all wanted to go there. But of course we didn't have time. I was already planning out another "someday" trip to San Antonio. I wanted to stay in a hotel overlooking the riverwalk. 

Speaking of hotels this one was really cool. The guide explained that San Antonio had hosted the worlds fair. They needed space for visitors, but didn't have time to construct more hotels. An architect had figured out how to pre-fabricate hotel rooms and then stack them onside. They'd built the hotel in something like 9 months. Here's more info about it. 

Like I said, I'm so glad we did this tour. We got to see so much. It was such a good use of our time. 

Here we are in the main river before we turned back to the horse shoe bend. 

This was the oldest Cypress Tree on the river. It's estimated to be over 200 years old. 

Our boat pulled back into the place where we'd started. We thanked the Captain and then started walking back to the parking garage. Along the way we passed a monument to Robert Hugman. 

We made it back to the car and the kids had fun with the drive down the circular ramps. 

By this point it was something like 3:30 and we still had so far to go before we got to our hotel for the night. My original plan had been to make it to Pecos, Texas which would have only been about 5 hours. But that was when I thought we'd be leaving from a campground on Friday morning. I figured it would take us a while to pack up the tent and get out of Galveston. 

After we gave up on the campsite and were in the hotel I figured that we'd have an easier time leaving in the morning. That meant we'd be able to drive further. So I changed our hotel for Friday night to one in Carlsbad, New Mexico. That added about an extra 90 minutes of driving on Friday, but it shortened how far we'd have to drive on Saturday. 

But now I was kind of regretting that. Because we still had almost 7 hours of driving ahead of us. And we were stuck in terrible traffic getting out of San Antonio. It took us almost 45 minutes just to get out of San Antonio. 

The kids watched Jurassic Park on the tablet while we drove. It was funny how things that took like 3 chapters to explain in the book were explained in like 5 minutes on screen. 

We stopped at a rest stop that had really pretty flowers. This was Salvia. I was already planning to plant some of this in my yard this year, but these plants really encouraged me. After we came home I bought some purple salvia because I'd liked these so much. 

I don't know why I took this picture. Just more driving.

We decided to stop in a town called Ozona to stretch, make dinner, and dry the swim suits and towels.  We stopped at a county park near the interstate. Brandon dug out the 550 cord and I stretched it between to posts at a pavilion. Then I hung up all the damp things. 

The kids played at the playground for a little bit, but had more fun at the skate park. 

I love this video of them playing. 

Back on Monday night Brandon had bought all the ingredients to make taco salad - including a tube of ground turkey. We'd frozen the turkey at Lindsey's and then put it into our small cooler on Tuesday morning. We'd planned to have taco salad for dinner on Wednesday. But we ended up fleeing to the hotel on Wednesday. So the ground turkey had gone into the hotel fridge on Wednesday. And then gone into the cooler again on Friday morning. We were finally having taco salad Friday night. Brandon got out the camp stove to cook the ground turkey. 

There was a lot of wind so we had to hold onto our plates tightly.  But the food was so good. We'd had way too much fast food on this trip so it was nice to have something that felt home cooked. 

All the towels and swimming suits had dried. So I packed them into bags and then took them over to the van. I spent a lot of time packing all the beach stuff back into the storage under the floor in front of the middle seats. I really liked that storage area. It was so nice to put all the beach stuff away and not have to worry about it getting in the way the rest of the drive. 

Brandon packed everything in the back. This is how it looked through our whole drive, but this is the only time I thought to take a picture of it. You'll notice that we still had the old camp chairs that Lindsey had given us. Brandon just couldn't bring himself to throw them away. They just weren't junky enough to justify it. We brought them all the way back to Idaho.

And then we just drove and drove and drove and drove some more. 

The kids watched movies. They watched Across the Spiderverse which is almost 3 hours long and we still weren't there when it was over. 

Most of the kids fell asleep around 10:30. They missed when we crossed the border between Texas and New Mexico. 

When we crossed the border we also went back in time by an hour. So when we finally made it to our motel it was only 11:30 New Mexico time, but it was really 12:30 Texas time.

We were back to separate rooms. Brandon took Charlotte and Lydia with him and I took Derrick and Veronica. The kids woke up for walking to the hotel room and carried their own bags. But they were asleep again pretty quick. 

It felt so good to have somewhere to lay down. I was sad that we'd left Texas. But I was really excited for what we were going to see the next day. We were going to Carl's Bad Caverns, which in some ways was the reason this whole trip was happening. 

But I'll explain that in the next post.