San Antonio – Day 5
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.
San Antonio – Day 4
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.
San Antonio – Day 2
The trip really kicked off on day two with a visit to Sea World.
Gina’s cousin Ginger and her husband, Mike, drove over from Houston to hang with us for a few days. Ginger, Abby and Gina braved certain dousing to ride the whitewater raft ride.
The sea lion show was pretty good.
While everybody was inside waiting for the Shamu show to start I wandered over to a nearby duck pond and shot a few birds.
This is the face Abby makes when she’s enjoying something and talking about it. She wanted to sit where the killer whales could splash her and splash her they did. I stood way in back out of the designated splash zone and shot her with a long lens.
Some of the animals seemed resigned to their fate.
We located a Grimaldi’s Pizza out in the suburbs somewhere and had to go. We first encountered Grimaldi’s last spring break in Brooklyn. It’s one of the famous pizzerias in New York City, but we didn’t realize there were locations elsewhere in the country. The atmosphere was nothing like the Brooklyn location but the pizza was just as good.
They even personalize the urinals at Grimaldi’s.
San Antonio – Day 1
For Spring Break we headed south to San Antonio. We arrived on St. Patrick’s Day and the downtown River Walk district was in a full-blown Irish frenzy. The water of the San Antonio River was even dyed green for the occasion.
We arrived in the afternoon so I shot some downtown walls in the sunset light.
The Bend! Day 4: Crossing The Rubicon
I’ll admit that I’m not much of camper. I love going out into the wilderness and rambling around and I’ll camp out if that’s the only way I’ll be able to visit some places, but I don’t like it. The whole camping thing is just such a hassle. Screwing with ice chests and camp stoves and flashlights and cooking outdoors and not bathing and participating in different bathroom routines is all bothersome but not really that big a deal. The thing that gets me is the tent. First you have to put the damn thing up and arrange some kind of bedding. Then you have to hope it doesn’t rain (admittedly not a great danger in the desert). Then to get up to pee in the middle of the night you have to use to the preternaturally loud zipper, which wakes up your tentmate(s) and possibly other nearby campers. And, if you’re in a campground, to pee in the night you have to put on pants and shoes and walk to the restroom. In addition, there’s the dish washing in cold water and the constant not being able to find things. Eventually you have to take down the tent and put up the bedding. It just sucks.
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The Bend! Day 3: ¡Viva Terlingua!
We got all rested up on Day 2 and we were ready to tackle some more desert hiking on Day 3 (or at least I was). We planned to meet Dale and Amber at 8 a.m. at the Pine Canyon trail head, but we got off to a late start after another rough night in the tent. A gale blew up and pummeled our cheapo Wal-Mart tent for hours. If you’ve never slept in a tent with a 35 mph wind blowing then you haven’t lived, my friend. I finally went to sleep around 1 a.m. and Gina was awake until the wind calmed down sometime around 3. Plus we had to take down our tent and pack up because checkout of the campsite was at noon. So we showed up at the trail a little over an hour late. Luckily Dale and Amber got there only about 30 minutes before we did and were inclined to wait for us. There’s very little cellular reception in the park, so we couldn’t communicate with each other. We were all going on plans we’d made the last time we saw each other two days earlier.
The Bend! Day 2: Chasing The Sunset
I had another long hike planned for the second day at Big Bend National Park, but the hike the afternoon before wore Gina and me out pretty good. Plus we had some inconsiderate campers in the site next to ours and they were whooping it up late into the night. At about 11 p.m. they were talking loudly about the cobbler they were cooking in a Dutch oven. Only about 15 yards separated them from the nearest other campers – us, and several other campsite were close by, but they acted as if they were 100 miles from other people. A little bit of excitement ensued earlier in the evening when a skunk invaded their campsite. To top it all off, they started being loud at about daylight. So they were the last thing we heard before going to sleep and the first thing we heard upon waking up.
We decided to scrap any plans for strenuous hiking for the day and instead went for drive on the west side of the park to see what we could see.
The Bend!
It only took 14 years, but I finally talked Gina into returning to Big Bend National Park for a camping trip. Her first trip, in 1996, got off to a shaky start when we rolled into the campground and the thermometer at the little store showed 114 degrees. In hindsight, it’s clear that visiting the desert during the last week of May is a bad idea if you’re not a big fan of heat. Then there was the fact that we went there in my little Ford Ranger that didn’t have air conditioning. Then there was the late-night incident with the javelina. Then there was the sandstorm that blew in and drove tiny grains of sand through the tent fabric, coating us in grit. We cut the trip short after three days and fled back to comparatively mild Little Rock.
This time, with a March trip planned, the weather promised to be much more reasonable and it was. It was even pretty chilly during the nights. Granted, I haven’t been many places in my life, but Big Bend is the most beautiful, scenic and downright neatest place I’ve ever been. This trip was my third to the park. I shot about 500 pictures and have picked out about 40 to put on the blog, so I’m going to dole them out over the next few days as I find time to get the photos processed. If you want to stretch you’re imagination, you can pretend I’m doing these entries in real time even though the trip was actually last week. I recommend you do that.
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