Going without an extra day off from New Years to Memorial Day is just too long. It's hard to keep your sanity when it's just work, sleep, repeat from the start of the year all the way to May. So, to break things up a bit, we scheduled ourselves a little vacation a few weeks ago. We'd heard that San Antonio was a fun town, plus we figured it would be nice and warm compared to Indiana in early February (it was not... highs were in the low 50s, so not exactly the warm vacation we wanted). But, regardless of the weather, we'd booked our trip so we headed down to Texas for a long weekend.
We left the Indy airport (the best airport in the world) early on Thursday morning. After a quick transfer at Midway we arrived in San Antonio ready for some vacationing. Our hotel check-in wasn't until 3pm, so we had a few hours to kill. We opted to have our Lyft drop us off at the Bier Garten and burn an hour or so there. We ordered a wurst sampler, some currywurst, and a couple of great beers. It was definitely a good way to waste some time.
After our leisurely lunch, we headed over to the hotel where we were asleep within half an hour of checking in. What's vacation without a nap? We slept, watched a little TV, and eventually made our way back to the River Walk to see what the hype was all about. And ya know what? Turns out it lived up to it. The River Walk is beautiful, even at night. It's extremely well done, with great landscaping, fun shops and restaurants, and (Leslie's favorite) a bunch of ducks swimming in the water next to us the whole time. After walking awhile and taking it all in, we settled on Casa Rio for a light dinner - for some reason we weren't overly hungry after having 18 pounds of sausage and fries and pretzels and whatnot earlier in the day. We had an appetizer sampler, which included these amazing bacon-wrapped jalapeno popper things, and then some sopapillas for dessert. At one point a mariachi band was going around playing for tables, so we of course had to have them serenade us. Leslie said she felt like she was on The Bachelor, where awkward concerts for two is apparently a pretty normal thing. Go figure.
The next day started off with breakfast at the hotel, then a Lyft down to Mission Espada on the southern end of the River Walk trail. While San Antonio is known, at least in part, for the Alamo, there are actually four other missions that make up the San Antonio Missions National Historic Park. So, for our second day of vacation, we chose to start at the southernmost mission, about 10 miles from downtown, and walk / bike our way back. This meant Espada was first on our list. We were there early and on a weekday, so it wasn't busy. In fact, the only real company we had here was a cat that jumped down from a tree to come say hello to us.
A nice walk along the river brought us to our next stop: Mission San Juan. This one was a lot more intact and had a little "museum" inside that showed a lot of the history of the missions. From here we rented bikes from the little bike-share thingy and rode on to the next one.
Next up was San Jose, which was probably my favorite. The grounds of this one were much bigger than the previous two. It also featured an impressive dome and some great stone carving work. Plus they had a little gift shop / museum area too where we watched a 20 minute movie about the building of the missions. This one was a little farther off the trail than the others had been, but definitely worth the trip.
The last of the four was Mission Concepcion. This is the most intact of the four, with some of the original painting inside still visible and a restored nave that was just beautiful. Cool as it was, we also didn't spend a lot of time here as we were starting to get tired. We'd just walked / biked like, nine miles in the cold... can you blame us?
And, last but not least, was the Alamo. This was, of course, the most crowded of all the places we'd been so far, and definitely the most commercial with an expansive museum, a large gift shop, people offering to take your picture so you can buy it at the gift shop, historic reenactors, plenty of park rangers, and a Haagen-Dazs just outside that we totally hit up before entering. It was a cool experience to see the real Alamo and to read about the history of the place. We walked through it all and, missioned-out as we were, still thought it was worth exploring for 45 mins. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise, especially since it's so close to the rest of the downtown River Walk attractions.
Post-Alamo, we headed to The Esquire Tavern, which is apparently the oldest bar on the River Walk. We didn't really care about that, as we were mostly there for their happy hour specials - $3 apps and $3 off cocktails! We got some delicious bar food (fried mac and cheese, chili salt fries, and rellenitos) plus a house cocktail similar to an old-fashioned for me and some sort of fruity thing for Leslie. It was all pretty amazing and made for a great reward after hiking to all the missions that morning.
Our next activity was an unplanned one - a boat tour on the river! We had seen the boats driving up and down the river, so we decided to give it a go. For only $10 each it provided a fun 30 minute tour of the River Walk area and we learned a lot of history that we probably wouldn't have picked up otherwise.
Then it was back to the hotel to rest our feet for a time. We really just took it easy for the rest of the afternoon until venturing back out to get a late dinner. After finding wait times to be too excessive at a few places we ended up at Zinc for some burgers and an impressive brioche apple bread pudding souffle. Just sitting here thinking back to this dinner is making my mouth water...
And with that it was already Saturday... our last full day. We started off with Lyft north to the San Antonio Zoo, because who doesn't love zoos? They had way more animals than I thought they would - lions, tigers, bears, and a very active king cobra that I both wanted to see and didn't want to see (don't worry, I didn't put a picture of him in here).
Next up was the San Antonio Museum of Art. They have a huge collection of antiquities along with more modern art. Unfortunately some of the museum was closed as they changed exhibits, but we looked at most everything else and had fun doing it. Plus it was indoors, so Leslie was excited to be able to stay warm for a bit.
After that we took a quick break for lunch at one of my favorite places of the trip. The Granary restaurant and brewery was a place I'd had picked out early on and did not want to miss. We tried a few beers, the brisket (we were in Texas, so of course we had to), the pulled pork, and the smoked pork belly. All the meats were delicious and really hit the spot.
Once we finished our smoked meat treats we headed to the old Market Square just west of downtown for a bit of shopping and, really, just to see what they had going on. The shops mostly sold junk, but we picked out a little souvenir and munched on some churros anyway. From there it was a quick walk back to our hotel where we vegged out until dinner.
And oh boy, dinner! I like to reserve our last night on vacation for somewhere special, and the one place that I kept seeing come up while planning the trip was Bliss. We had to go. And wow, it was so amazingly good! I got the duck / foie gras and Leslie had the scallops. Simply amazing. We also split a Texas goat cheese cheesecake that was somehow perfectly tangy and sweet and... amazing. Seriously, this place was so nice and had such good food. It was the perfect "end" to our vacation.
But obviously dinner at Bliss wasn't the end of the trip. On Sunday morning we got up and headed out with our bags in tow to the Guenther House in the beautiful King Williams district. We had an amazing breakfast (a real, hearty send-off before heading home, as we wouldn't have time for lunch all day) - chicken and waffles for me and pancakes for Leslie. We also split an order of the quiche San Antonio, which was filled with chorizo, peppers, potatoes, cheese, and probably more wonderful things too. We then walked around looking at the beautiful and expensive houses before calling a Lyft and heading to the airport. And thus ended our lovely weekend getaway.
And there you have it! Our little adventure to break up the monotony of everyday life - Spring Edition, 2017. It was a great trip, even if the weather didn't cooperate (it was actually warmer in Indy when we landed). But hey, that's how it goes sometimes. It was great fun and a good getaway nonetheless.
Thanks for reading and we'll be back at ya again soon!
After our leisurely lunch, we headed over to the hotel where we were asleep within half an hour of checking in. What's vacation without a nap? We slept, watched a little TV, and eventually made our way back to the River Walk to see what the hype was all about. And ya know what? Turns out it lived up to it. The River Walk is beautiful, even at night. It's extremely well done, with great landscaping, fun shops and restaurants, and (Leslie's favorite) a bunch of ducks swimming in the water next to us the whole time. After walking awhile and taking it all in, we settled on Casa Rio for a light dinner - for some reason we weren't overly hungry after having 18 pounds of sausage and fries and pretzels and whatnot earlier in the day. We had an appetizer sampler, which included these amazing bacon-wrapped jalapeno popper things, and then some sopapillas for dessert. At one point a mariachi band was going around playing for tables, so we of course had to have them serenade us. Leslie said she felt like she was on The Bachelor, where awkward concerts for two is apparently a pretty normal thing. Go figure.
The next day started off with breakfast at the hotel, then a Lyft down to Mission Espada on the southern end of the River Walk trail. While San Antonio is known, at least in part, for the Alamo, there are actually four other missions that make up the San Antonio Missions National Historic Park. So, for our second day of vacation, we chose to start at the southernmost mission, about 10 miles from downtown, and walk / bike our way back. This meant Espada was first on our list. We were there early and on a weekday, so it wasn't busy. In fact, the only real company we had here was a cat that jumped down from a tree to come say hello to us.
A nice walk along the river brought us to our next stop: Mission San Juan. This one was a lot more intact and had a little "museum" inside that showed a lot of the history of the missions. From here we rented bikes from the little bike-share thingy and rode on to the next one.
Next up was San Jose, which was probably my favorite. The grounds of this one were much bigger than the previous two. It also featured an impressive dome and some great stone carving work. Plus they had a little gift shop / museum area too where we watched a 20 minute movie about the building of the missions. This one was a little farther off the trail than the others had been, but definitely worth the trip.
The last of the four was Mission Concepcion. This is the most intact of the four, with some of the original painting inside still visible and a restored nave that was just beautiful. Cool as it was, we also didn't spend a lot of time here as we were starting to get tired. We'd just walked / biked like, nine miles in the cold... can you blame us?
And, last but not least, was the Alamo. This was, of course, the most crowded of all the places we'd been so far, and definitely the most commercial with an expansive museum, a large gift shop, people offering to take your picture so you can buy it at the gift shop, historic reenactors, plenty of park rangers, and a Haagen-Dazs just outside that we totally hit up before entering. It was a cool experience to see the real Alamo and to read about the history of the place. We walked through it all and, missioned-out as we were, still thought it was worth exploring for 45 mins. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise, especially since it's so close to the rest of the downtown River Walk attractions.
Post-Alamo, we headed to The Esquire Tavern, which is apparently the oldest bar on the River Walk. We didn't really care about that, as we were mostly there for their happy hour specials - $3 apps and $3 off cocktails! We got some delicious bar food (fried mac and cheese, chili salt fries, and rellenitos) plus a house cocktail similar to an old-fashioned for me and some sort of fruity thing for Leslie. It was all pretty amazing and made for a great reward after hiking to all the missions that morning.
Our next activity was an unplanned one - a boat tour on the river! We had seen the boats driving up and down the river, so we decided to give it a go. For only $10 each it provided a fun 30 minute tour of the River Walk area and we learned a lot of history that we probably wouldn't have picked up otherwise.
Then it was back to the hotel to rest our feet for a time. We really just took it easy for the rest of the afternoon until venturing back out to get a late dinner. After finding wait times to be too excessive at a few places we ended up at Zinc for some burgers and an impressive brioche apple bread pudding souffle. Just sitting here thinking back to this dinner is making my mouth water...
And with that it was already Saturday... our last full day. We started off with Lyft north to the San Antonio Zoo, because who doesn't love zoos? They had way more animals than I thought they would - lions, tigers, bears, and a very active king cobra that I both wanted to see and didn't want to see (don't worry, I didn't put a picture of him in here).
Next up was the San Antonio Museum of Art. They have a huge collection of antiquities along with more modern art. Unfortunately some of the museum was closed as they changed exhibits, but we looked at most everything else and had fun doing it. Plus it was indoors, so Leslie was excited to be able to stay warm for a bit.
After that we took a quick break for lunch at one of my favorite places of the trip. The Granary restaurant and brewery was a place I'd had picked out early on and did not want to miss. We tried a few beers, the brisket (we were in Texas, so of course we had to), the pulled pork, and the smoked pork belly. All the meats were delicious and really hit the spot.
Once we finished our smoked meat treats we headed to the old Market Square just west of downtown for a bit of shopping and, really, just to see what they had going on. The shops mostly sold junk, but we picked out a little souvenir and munched on some churros anyway. From there it was a quick walk back to our hotel where we vegged out until dinner.
And oh boy, dinner! I like to reserve our last night on vacation for somewhere special, and the one place that I kept seeing come up while planning the trip was Bliss. We had to go. And wow, it was so amazingly good! I got the duck / foie gras and Leslie had the scallops. Simply amazing. We also split a Texas goat cheese cheesecake that was somehow perfectly tangy and sweet and... amazing. Seriously, this place was so nice and had such good food. It was the perfect "end" to our vacation.
But obviously dinner at Bliss wasn't the end of the trip. On Sunday morning we got up and headed out with our bags in tow to the Guenther House in the beautiful King Williams district. We had an amazing breakfast (a real, hearty send-off before heading home, as we wouldn't have time for lunch all day) - chicken and waffles for me and pancakes for Leslie. We also split an order of the quiche San Antonio, which was filled with chorizo, peppers, potatoes, cheese, and probably more wonderful things too. We then walked around looking at the beautiful and expensive houses before calling a Lyft and heading to the airport. And thus ended our lovely weekend getaway.
And there you have it! Our little adventure to break up the monotony of everyday life - Spring Edition, 2017. It was a great trip, even if the weather didn't cooperate (it was actually warmer in Indy when we landed). But hey, that's how it goes sometimes. It was great fun and a good getaway nonetheless.
Thanks for reading and we'll be back at ya again soon!
