san antonio

Perry and I recently got back from a four day trip to San Antonio. Since I work 7 days on/7 days off and Perry will have summers off being a school teacher, we have big summer vacation dreams in the future. But that's still the future. Right now we're a single income household and a 5 hour road trip is as extravagant as we can comfortably get. Since the room at the bed and breakfast I booked had a extra bedroom attached and my dear sister just happens to live on the way down, we invited her and her boyfriend to come along too.

I have a confession to make that's rather awkward. I don't do well on vacations. I enjoy planning vacations. New places to see, new foods to eat, new things to do. But there's always a point in every vacation I can remember where I feel extremely...well I don't know. Irritated isn't really the word for it, it's more of a general feeling of unhappiness, loneliness even. Crowds of people make me feel lonely. After a while the unfamiliar seems draining. So much to see that I can never see, so many people I will never know, my small life seeming smaller by the vastness of the world. There's something depressing about seeing an image in a picture and then seeing it in actuality before you and thinking "Huh. Yep. Exactly like the picture." I expect to feel something more and when I don't, I feel wrong and hollow. So much moving around and so little...experiencing. I know vacation is not the best time to have an existential crisis, but there you have it. No matter how excited I may be about a trip I am always incredibly excited to go back home, to my own well worn corner of the Earth, filled with the things I know and love. Have a mentioned that I'm an introvert?

I've gone on a bit, but all I mean to say is this trip was no different from all the rest. I've come to realize that these feeling will pop up on any journey I take, so I acknowledge them and put on a happy face until they wane. Which they always do.

Now here are some pictures. Because that's what vacation posts are about, not whining.


We visited Mission San Jose. I've already seen it twice, but I really love this place, so when our bus tour went by we hopped off for some pictures.

 See? Beautiful.

 The day after our bus tour, we visited the zoo. I don't think I've ever seen a scarlet ibis before, but I recognized them immediately from the illustration in a book of short stories we had to read in middle school. The story with the scarlet ibis was...The Scarlet Ibis. That story scarred me, so I still remembered the picture after all this time.

 And here's a green mamba, from The Poisonwood Bible.

 But since I don't take pictures of animals solely because of the roles they played in literature, here's a hippo.

Taking pictures of your food is lame unless it's of the best sushi you've had in your entire life and you want to document it. Here's Perry's:

Those rolls in in the red sauce may have been the best thing I've ever eaten. Ever. Oh and see the milky looking sake? Perry got drunk. He drinks alcohol about twice a year and had a BMI of 17. It doesn't take much to get him drunk.

Here's my bento.

They served it with two small salads instead of the typical fried roll and wonton. It was so good.

We ate a lot of good food on our trip. I thought we would be eating almost exclusively Tex-Mex since we were in San Antonio but we only had Mexican food for one meal. I went to San Antonio once with my mother and all we ate was Mexican food: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We became so enamored with one restaurant we ate there at least once a day. At least.

And since we were at San Antonio we had to see the Alamo.

Yeah, we didn't know what was going on either. It turns out they were holding a promotion for a boxing match in front of the Alamo. Which seems strange. Oh and there were numerous groups of Christians with backpacks everywhere. Every. Where. It turns out there was some kind of church youth group meet up that week.

My sister and I went back to the Alamo a day later around sunset to take a ghost tour (no judging). And here's a much better photo I took while we were waiting for it to start.

That may have actually been my favorite part of the trip. No, not the ghost tour. But sitting in front of the Alamo on a stone bench eating a snow cone and talking with my sister.

It occurs to me that I'm not the first person to be disillusioned with vacations. Modest Mouse did say "we are the places that we wanted to go." I wonder if that's what was meant.