On our final full day in San Antone I got up at the butt crack of dawn to shoot the Alamo when it wouldn’t be swarmed with tourists and vendors hawking to the tourists. It was pretty neat being the only person visiting the Alamo besides the grounds crew blowing off the walkway with super loud industrial strength leaf blowers.

Around the corner from the Alamo is the Menger Bar.

Gina brought up the idea of making a jaunt down to the border, but I had a vague idea that that part of the border was a bad place to be. I was right. But I came across a pamphlet touting the San Antonio Market Square. It’s a two-block area of shops filled with Mexican tourist crap. It’s as if they brought the border two hours north so that we could experience a different culture without being decapitated and our gutted carcasses stuffed with cocaine. It was a great place to take pictures because everything was colorful and arrayed in interesting patterns. I was happy to see that these Lucha Libre masks were a real thing and not just a prop from a bad Jack Black movie.

A lot of Virgin Mary kitsch going on in that place.

Judging from the amount of stock, the most popular item for border tourists are theCatrina dolls of Dia de los Muertos fame. Gina bought a doll decked out in a wedding dress. The doll. Not Gina.

It’s apparently a thing in Texas to take pictures of your kids among the blue bonnets. We found a good patch on the outskirts of the city and forced Abby to sit for a portrait. A man and his two kids were there doing the same thing.

I didn’t have any light modifiers with me so I used two plastic Walgreens bags as a makeshift softbox. As much as I’d like to chalk this idea up to being a genius, I had recently seen this technique demonstrated on the Strobist blog.

Gina served as my voice-activated light stand.

We kicked off our third day by hitting a caverns tour in the morning. It was really dark underground so no pictures. The next morning we hit the Alamo, a short walk under the interstate from our hotel. It turns out that Texas takes the Alamo way too seriously. When we walked in the front door I was immediately accosted for wearing a hat. You see, the Alamo is a shrine and any arbitrary form of disrespect is met with swift and brutal consequences. It’s not OK to wear a hat inside the Alamo, but it’s perfectly fine to operate a money grubbing souvenir stand selling the usual crappy items aimed at tourists and their kids. For all the love of the Alamo, it’s not even a very good museum. The exhibits are sparse and do only a superficial job of explaining the history. Also, photos aren’t allowed. I got the top photo of the best exhibit in the place by putting my camera on its super-spy-silent mode and firing from the hip.

Gina and Abby bolted to the nearby children’s museum while I wandered downtown taking pictures.

The Texas spring break was the week before we were there.

We spent the late afternoon and evening at the River Walk.