Hotel Havana, San Antonio.
Our room opened right out onto a beautiful balcony.
Our hire car, a Lincoln MKT. Huge!San Antonio would be the perfect long weekend away - if we lived in LA or San Francisco. It's a rather flat city with a tourist precinct built along a river. The element that connects downtown San Antonio is a thoroughfare called the 'Riverwalk' and it is gorgeous; more like a European canal. We saw lots of ducks and water birds, squirrels and even a turtle as we were walking along!
The San Antonio Riverwalk. (Sorry about the dark photo of Mark, it's all I have!)Hotel Havana was located about 5 minutes walk from all of the action, and I must admit the tourist area (which is something I usually avoid) is really attractive and amenable. We only had 24 hours in San Antonio so we visited the San Antonio Museum of Art and The Alamo, not before visiting the local IMAX theatre to watch the story of The Alamo (seems this is a sacred moment in American history but like parts of Australian history, it's sort of questionable!)
The Alamo.
The rather odd but very enjoyable Mi Tierra restaurant - open 24 hours per day since 1941!We also visited the landmark restaurant, Mi Tierra. The only way of describing this restaurant is by saying the interior felt like living inside a Christmas tree! If I were a child this would surely be my favourite restaurant in the world. We enjoyed gigantic helpings of food and a mariachi band played us a 'happy' Mexican song, which was the song from the 'One Tonne Rodeo' Holden ad a few years back. We fairly rolled right out of there and tried to walk it off...shame that this part of America is all about driving!
A surprise for us both was that San Antonio had it's own 'Market Square' or 'El Mercado.' It was sort of an indoor Mexican Market with lots of stalls selling all of the touristy stuff... just that Mexican touristy stuff is sooo good! We stocked up on a few embroidered shirts and platters and I'm glad we did because we didn't see anything similar elsewhere in Texas.
The beautiful Ocho.
Mark sets up office.Before leaving the following morning, we ate the most beautiful meal at the hotel cafe, Ocho. This has to be one of my favourite meals of this trip, Mark and I sat up above the river in a glass conservatory-style room, shaded by magnolia trees and palm fronds. I had some fantastic 'huevos ranchero' which was a 'little' plate of scrambled eggs, grilled banana, chorizo patty, tortilla and refried beans. The cool breeze blew in and we considered the drive ahead. I think we were both a little disappointed to leave San Antonio so soon!
It was an easy 3 hour drive to Houston where we had some more family-type stuff to do. My attempts at eating there were rather unsuccessful and we ended up at Wholefoods (a sort of upscale supermarket, Sydney needs a few!) for two meals because I was seriously feeling a lack of nutrition!
The Rothko Chapel for those of all beliefs and denominations.
The Cy Twombly Gallery.The most pleasant surprise with Houston was The Menil Collection - which is a group of art museums funded by a very, very wealthy family which includes the Rothko Chapel and Cy Twombly Gallery. This was special and evoked some emotion, particularly the large rooms of Twomblys! But driving around all the time in Houston evoked a different type of emotion. The hot weather and long periods on the road (even in our comfy car) meant I sort of felt stale for much of the time, even though we stayed in the very nice Hotel Magnolia.
The Hotel Magnolia, Houston.We wound up our trip to Texas with a 7 hour drive to New Orleans, but more on that later :)