Tag: san antonio

Missing Pictures

You know, I really wish Thomas had given me more warning that we were going to split up. I mean, I know I this is the stupidest reason in the world for something like this, but I’m very disappointed that so many of my photographic memories and things are gone.

Ages ago when digital cameras first became a thing, Thomas bought a digital camera that used floppy disks and he filed floppy disk after floppy disk when we traveled and then he copied them onto his computer and I figured we were going to be together forever and that they were safe on his computer. I figured I’d be able to access them whenever I needed to. In fact, getting my own computer was something of a bone of contention. He figured that I could do my writing and things on his computer when he wasn’t using it. Finally he gave in.

Part of me wants to go back to all the places we went during that era, but now that I’m thinking about it, I’m not sure where we all went. I mean we have pictures from when we first moved to San Antonio. We took trips to Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio. We went to Austin and to wherever-we-were in Louisiana. But I think those were all before the digital camera. We may have been using one of those el cheapo cameras. Not the disposable kind, but one of those little plastic point-and-shoot cameras. Did we have a Kodak disk camera at some point? We may have.

I have some old undeveloped rolls of film. I wonder what’s on them. I should take those and get those developed. I also should put on a pair of gloves and a mask and go into the dusty garage and see if there’s pictures in there.*

During our marriage, we took, let’s see, the trip our first honeymoon which was right after our wedding was Indianapolis. We went to Union Station and there’s, like, a Civil War monument there, and we went to Eagle Creek Park, and we discovered that the art museum is closed on Mondays. I think I may have gotten a picture of Love, by Robert Indiana, though I don’t know. God. Our second honeymoon I know there’s a bunch of pictures from that. We left Chicago and went down through Indiana and Kentucky and Tennessee we stopped at Rock City on the border between Tennessee and Georgia and then we drove to Florida we stayed at my mom’s best friend’s house. We went to Corkscrew Swamp and Disney World and did Epcot and some of the Magic Kingdom. On our way out of Corkscrew Swamp, we decided to take Alligator Alley to the end, so we ended up in Naples at the beach. We dabbled in the Gulf for a bit and headed back to the East Coast. We met my cousins who were living in Florida at the time. We got there really late because I couldn’t find the turn and this was in the days before Google Maps. We finally had to stop at the Circle K which is literally around the corner from the house for a map.

On the way home, we went to Stone Mountain Park has a very problematic history but it’s beautiful. We went to Shakertown in Kentucky and should have pictures from both of those. We also stopped at Berea College because I was very interested in a college without tuition (students work to earn their education). I don’t know if I have pictures from there, though. Then we went to Wyandotte Caves in Indiana and I should have pictures of that. These were all before the first digital camera. Oh! We stopped at St. Augustine on our way down, too. There was a pigeon bothering the employees of a bakery that we went into. I think we took a picture of the pigeon.

That’s 1991 and 1992. In 1993 we moved down here and went to Chicago for the Visions science fiction convention. I think we went every year until they stopped. We probably have pictures of a bunch of Doctor Who actors somewhere, but not much in the way of sightseeing pictures. Oh! One year we hung out with my parents and cousins (different cousins from the Florida ones) and went lighthouse spotting. That might’ve been after Alex was born, now that I think of it, so it probably was during the reign of the second digital camera.

I know that in 2006 we went to Fort Lauderdale and saw the smaller King Tut exhibit at the art museum. This one had a Akhenaten, speaking of problematic, but the statue was amazing. One of of my trips, we went to Miami but the friend are going to meet got sick and didn’t make it.

I’m very fortunate that I grabbed all of the pictures of Alex and all of the pictures that Alex took that I could find. In fact, that covers a lot of territory. Alex got his first camera in 2003, so it covers the 2003 trips to Disney and Key West. I also copied all of the pictures from our UK trip that I could find to my computer.

Now there was a long pause while I tried to remember if Thomas and I really went anywhere else. Mentally, I was going over a map of the US.

We went to Toronto, but I have a lot of those pictures. We went to a wedding in Eau Claire Wisconsin and decided to go to the Minnesota State Fair and then stopped off in Madison on the way home. That was just before our wedding, so no digital pictures there.

I always thought that Thomas and I did a lot of traveling, but I don’t think we did. We basically just traveled around Texas and went back and forth between San Antonio and Chicago, and San Antonio and Florida. We did go to California several times and I retook a lot of those pictures in 2017.

We took a weekend trip to Seattle once. I’ll have to go back there and take pictures.

I’ll also have to try to remember where all in Texas we went. We went to the Dallas Museum of Art and to the Galleria in Houston. The Texas State Aquarium. Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas, but Alex and I were back there just . . . 2018?

I’ve been thinking that I missing a lot of memories and I don’t think I am I think most of what he have is in the garage covered in dust. That’ll be fun.

Speaking of travel, our Gratuitous Amazon Link for today is a Percy Jackson and the Olympians book, The Sea of Monsters, by Rick Riordan. And the Percyverse books are all about the travel, even when the travel is just among the realms of Norse mythology. Which isn’t the case here. That’d be odd. In The Sea of Monsters, they spend a lot of time at sea and also visit Chesapeake Bay.

Walk on the Riverwalk, March 19, 2022, Part 2

I’m hearing somebody doing I don’t know kind of cheer or something up ahead. They sound very excited, for whatever that’s worth. I hope I’m not walking into a riot or something. I guess we’ll figure out what it is when I get there.

I am passing yet another dam. This is the H.H. Hugman Dam and it used to mark the end of the Riverwalk. When they decided to make the Riverwalk go through from here, they cut a chunk out of the dam to make room for the boats to pass through.

The yelling from before has turned into music which is less concerning than the yelling was. That’s a good sign.

Once upon a time, there was a performance venue called the San Antonio Municipal Auditorium. The building was gorgeous. The actual performance area was . . . okay. Thomas and I saw Phantom of the Opera there in the 90s. In the early 2000s, the city decided that it needed a more state-of-the-art venue and so they razed all but the facade of the auditorium and built two new theaters onto the back. They named the building the Tobin Center, for Robert L.B. Tobin. The new building is this big metal box with lights on the outside and it’s pretty impressive at night. At the side of the building is an outdoor performance venue named for Will Naylor Smith. That seems to be where the music is coming from.. Let’s go closer and find out.

It seemed like I missed whatever it was because people are walking away carrying folding chairs. Maybe there is a sign indicating what it was.

I take that back. It looks like whatever it is it still going on. This is apparently some kind of St. Patrick’s Day event. The performance I was hearing was a punk band called Pinata Protest. That certainly explains the yelling.

It looks like there’s a parade on the River. Or maybe the parade is breaking up. I’ll have to look that up when I get home. I’m thinking that “I have to look that up when I get home” is the theme of this little experiment.

On my right now is the Southwest School of Art, which recently merged with… UTSA? Let’s all say it together. I’ll look it up when I get home. The site for the Southwest School of Art originally was the Ursuline Convent and Academy which was a Catholic girls’ school that was run by French nuns. French nuns formed a lot of San Antonio’s culture. We have the Ursuline Academy here and the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word founded the University of the Incarnate Word, Incarnate Word High School, and Santa Rosa Hospital.

This land here was the far north of San Antonio when the buildings were constructed for the school. As a result, they didn’t bother putting a fourth face on the clock on top of the building. If you were east, south, or west of the building, you could tell what time it is. If you were north, you were out of luck.

I’ve just arrived downtown and there’s this pergola thing that wasn’t there before on the other side of the river. I’m so glad I’m getting my knockoff GoPro soon. I’ll have to come back later and explore that area.

You you you you you ← I’m not sure what happened there. It’s so weird, though, that I decided to keep it.

I’m passing past another mosaic. This one is by Oscar Alvarado from 2002 and is of a bunch of famous buildings in the city and, for some reason, a dog. The buildings include the Tower of the Americas, the Tower Life Building, San Fernando Cathedral, and the Alamo. I’m trying to figure the dog out, but having no luck.

Mosaic, Riverwalk, by Oscar Alvarado, 2002

I’m almost to the place where I am going to turn around. I’m passing the Embassy Suites Hotel on my right. He hotel has a waterfall on the Riverwalk level and people are taking pictures in front it.

On my left there is a building that I used to know the name of. The name was basically the address “(number) Houston Street.” God only knows what that number is. I sure don’t.* There was some excitement about this building when they were constructing it. There was a movie palace called Texas Theatre that was on this site and they were going to take it down for the new building. The Conservation Society was trying to stop the building going up the injunction they needed came down when all that was left of the theater was the façade so the architects and engineers included the facade of the Texas Theatre in the front of the building.**

I’m under Houston Street now which is technically where I should turn around, but there have been parade floats coming up the river as I was walking down and I can see more coming, so I may just keep walking.

I’m on my back north. I stopped to watch the floats. There weren’t that many left.*** I went up to the surface and took some pictures of the IBC Center and the Hotel Valencia and then came back down.

*The number I was thinking of was 175 E. Houston and the name of the building is the IBC Center.

**At least, that’s the story. In order for that to be strictly true, though, they would have to have torn the Texas Theater down back-to-front and what are the odds? I wonder if either (a) the architects always intended to include the facade, or (b) they suspected that the Conservation Society would get their injunction, so they left the most attractive part for last. Now I think I’m going to have to take some time and research that.

***After I got back to the lock and dam, I found that the floats were gathering there, and then on my walk back to the Pearl, I saw people sitting down along the Riverwalk. I guess that the floats I saw were on their way to regroup for an evening parade farther north. I was running out of water, though, so I just headed back home. After all, I’d already seen the floats.

Riverwalk, March 19, 2022, Part 1

Okay today I am doing the section from The Pearl to Houston Street, if I can make it that far. It’s already 4 PM so we’ll see how that goes.

This is the weekend after St. Patrick’s Day, so the river is San Antonio River is green. I mean it’s always kind of greenish but, but it’s really green now. I took a picture of the little waterfall at The Grotto by Carlos Cortez. I’m going to post it below.

I changed my mind. I didn’t like that picture as well as I liked this one, which was taken under the Navarro Street Bridge.

When there’s flooding in San Antonio, the flood water in the river goes under downtown. There is a drain that starts just north of The Pearl and goes through an underground tunnel all the way through downtown and comes up again south of downtown. I will get to both ends of this tunnel eventually. Right now I am passing one of the ventilation shafts for the tunnel.

Now I am going under Interstate 35. Bats live under this bridge during the spring through the fall. There are a lot of bats in south and central Texas. After the construction of the Ann Richards Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, which is home to a colony of bats, they discovered that bats make good neighbors. Texas started constructing bridges so that the bats would could nest there. Under this bridge is another piece of public art, F.I.S.H. By Donald Lipski, which is a school of gigantic illuminated long-eared sunfish. Long-eared sunfish are native to the San Antonio River, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one myself. Mostly I’ve seen minnows and catfish.

I’m passing some apartments. I would dearly love to – without inheriting the money because I love my dad – have the money to live in the apartments down here. Maybe I will someday be able to find a groove with this blog and make a whole bunch of money. Ha! But who knows? I may find the money somewhere. Someday.

Maybe.

I would actually prefer to live closer to the Pearl, just for the ambience. There are musicians and things out there and people and it’s just so lively. I loved living in the dorms when I was in college, because there were a lot of people and activity and music and I just felt less isolated than I feel in the suburbs.

I’m about to cross the Brewery Bridge. This bridge, which is in the image at the top of my blog, used to span the space between the two towers of the Lone Star Brewery. This brewery is now the San Antonio Museum of Art and the bridge across it is glassed-in.

It occurred to me recently that the GoPro lite that I’m planning to buy will also help in this project of dictating my blog posts. Sometimes the app mixes up what I said and so once I have the camera, I can always go back and listen to what I actually said.

In 2009, they installed a bunch of new public art on the Riverwalk. In the years since then, some of it, like F.I.S.H. is just fine, but others have fallen into disrepair. I’m passing one of them as I speak. This is Sonic Passage, by Bill Fontana. Fontana took a microphone and traveled up and down the river in all seasons and captured the sounds of birds and frogs and fish jumping out of and landing back in the water and things like that. Then he looped selections from that recording and had them playing on speakers under the Jones Street Bridge. This one worked for quite a while. Evelyn and I have been walking on the river together for the last several years, and the sound really bothered her dogs. I was one of her dogs by myself and she just took off running.

I am now passing more apartments that are too expensive for me, insert pouting emoji. If there is such a thing as a pouting emoji, There is an interpretive sign here about the Alamo Mills Dam. I don’t know exactly where the mill was (it was probably under the apartments), but parts of the dam are still here.

On my left is VFW Post 76 which is the oldest VFW post in Texas. If I recall it’s actually the building is the oldest post but I don’t think I don’t think the VFW has been there that long, I’ll have to once again have to look it up at home.*

There still more land from the Art Museum on my right here and more apartments on my left. I’m passing this kind of artificial little marshy area. The interpretive signage is about marsh ecology and how marshes form when bends in the river are blocked off by sediment. The plants here are marsh plants. There used to be a banana tree, but I guess they figured that it wasn’t native. Also, I don’t know how well the banana tree did after the Snowpocalypse of 2021.

Now on my right there’s a building. I honestly don’t know what takes up most of the building, but the top floor is a bar. Now, I don’t drink. Anybody who knows me knows that. However this bar is where they have a drag brunch on Sunday. And I really would like to go to the drag brunch. They’ve got to have non-alcoholic beverages for the designated drivers. Alternatively, I can always fall back on the old standby of drink mixers, like I did in the days before designated drivers.

On my right I have a Wyndham Garden Hotel which looks like a nice place to stay. It’s certainly convenient to the Riverwalk. To my left is I don’t know what. It’s a building that always looks empty when I’m walking down here. Of course, it’s possible that I’m only here when they’re closed. I need to go to the surface level sometime and find out what this is.

Here is the lock and dam, which opened in 2009. The San Antonio River drops or goes up suddenly depending on which direction are going. So when they decided they wanted to run boats on this part of the river, they had to build a lock. For anyone who doesn’t know what a lock is, it’s a sort of box where you put the boat in and you pump water into the box raise to the boat up to the new level or you put a boat in and suck water out until they’re down at the level of the river. There are always a bunch of double-crested cormorants on the dam as well, which is cool.

The next piece of art on the Riverwalk is 29° 26′ 00″ N and 98° 29′ 07″ W by Stewart Allen. This is steel frames with colored steel strings across it. The original intent was for the colors in the frames to morph as you pass by, and, as I recall, it did that for a number of years. But, like Sonic Passage, 29° 26′ 00″ N and 98° 29′ 07″ W has fallen into disrepair and the colors are muted. If you didn’t know it was art, you might mistake it for part of the underpass.

*It is the first VFW post founded in the state of Texas. At least, no numbers in the state are lower. Post 76 was founded in 1917, and the next-oldest, 688, was founded in Boerne in 1936. So there you go.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time. Today we have the first book in the Scholomance trilogy by Naomi Novik, A Deadly Education. The protagonist of the series is Galadriel, El for short, who is terrified of her own potential for dark magic. The book is set at the Scholomance, a magical school where all of the education is self-guided, and monsters roam the halls (and the ventilation shafts, and the plumbing).

Walk on the River Walk, March 6, 2022, Part 3

As I go under the Guenther Street Bridge, I notice how many spiderwebs there are here. It took me a while to remember what these spiderwebs remind me of. It’s when Alex and I went to the Great Salt Lake. There were all of these little flies all over the place and, drawn to the all-you-can-eat buffet of flies, there were also a lot of spiders. I love spiders, so this was fascinating. However, the grandfather of the family that arrived just after us was freaked out.

As I walk farther, I noticed the sound of the Pioneer Flour Mill. It always makes this kind of regular humming sound, which is understandable. It’s probably the mill milling. But there’s also an occasional hissing, like a can of compressed air.

So I’m going back north. I think that rather than going over the bridge this time, instead I’m going to under the Johnson Street bridge past the arsenal which I’ll talk about a little as I pass it probably and then cross the river back to the other side. I will have to cross the river twice. One of those crossings is going have to be on or just after Nueva Street. There’s no pathway on this side of the river after that. Then my car is on this side, so I will have to cross back over later on.

So now I am at the headquarters of HEB which was the United States Arsenal. I guess that the interpretive signage is on the other side of the river since the interpretive signage on this side is for Guenther’s Upper Mill, which is on the other side. Anyway this was the United States arsenal from 18 something to 19 something. I think after the Civil War.

To be honest with you, when I first ended up working at my current retail location, I actually wondered if there was some way I could parlay it into a job at HEB headquarters, since I have corporate home office experience and retail experience, I figured, “Why not?” I searched for jobs for quite a while, but nearly all of the postings I saw were for graphic designers. I’m sure I could pick it up, since I’ve been trained in five careers so far, but I’d rather be able to get paid for something I can already do.

I found the interpretive signage on this side of the river. Construction began on the arsenal in 1859, but the Civil War interrupted it. Then after the war, it became the arsenal again until 1947. It sat empty for quite a while before HEB bought it.

I think I’m going to cross over the Nueva Street Dam and Marina. The name of it is a lot of words but there you go.

I was originally supposed to be doing this with Evelyn but she hasn’t been feeling well lately, so I’m doing this by myself. I guess that’s okay though, since I’m doing this narrating thing. I’d probably be talking to her and socializing. Maybe walking with dogs because she’s got several of them. She’s got custody of Mila right now.

I keep forgetting to punctuate and add paragraphs. I guess I can do that later once I get home, but sometimes just trying to figure out what I was intending to say is we kind of adventure. We’ll see how this turns out.

At this point, I found that I must have gone through and edited most of this before. The next few paragraphs look pretty good, at any rate.

I just passed where the Texas Master Naturalists Wildscape Garden used to be (it’s in Hardberger Park West now) There’s this really old-looking building right there, and there’s no historical marker or sign or anything indicating what it is. Maybe I get home I’ll look it up.*

Spring is upon us. I have seen at least three animals in pursuit of reproductive success. Right now two squirrels are chasing each other and earlier I passed a couple of pigeons who seemed to be feeling romantic. And when I started my walk, I saw two male ducks either trying to mate or fighting. They kept nipping each other on the neck. They didn’t look angry about it. Maybe they just weren’t to the angry part yet.

I’m on the Nueva Street Dam now. There are traffic cones with arrows attached. I’m not sure what the arrows mean**. This dam is one of the places where we stop the flow of the river when it’s flooding. And also we use it when we clean the river out. I have some pictures of the river when it’s drained. I’ll have to see if I can find them.

There’s some kind of rusty stuff on one of the sides of the dam. I’m not going to take pictures because it looks pretty unappetizing.***

I am now passing the statue of Francisco Madero who was president of Mexico or something like that. There’s an interpretive sign here. Let me see. This is the site of the former Hutchins Hotel, which was his headquarters. He was kicked out of Mexico in 1910 and when he went back to Mexico he became president in 1911, and was assassinated in 1913. That was fast.

I was here one time in . . . November? The statue here was decorated with flowers. I tried to figure what that was about and I never did. I’ll have to remember to come here next November and try that same day and if I do, maybe I’ll call the city to see what’s up with that.

Near the dam is the marina where the barges that the tours run on, and I think the river taxi as well, are stored. There is also a double crested cormorant sitting on a cable here. The first time Alex and I saw one of those, it disappeared beneath the water and didn’t come back out, so we called it the Loch Ness Monster. Though the term may actually have been used first by a passerby. After some time passed and I was like, trying to figure out what the heck that had been and finally I found a description of double crested Cormorant and looked it up and by golly that was what it was. So I mentioned to my dad after that and he’s like just based on the description of it, I could have told you that. And I was like “lot of help you are.”

I didn’t think it was going to get this warm today I should have worn shorts. I’ll survive. Probably. If you find a news article about a woman who has melted on the Riverwalk that might be me. I think that my next weekday off, I’ll walk around the surface and talk about the buildings things that I pass.****

The only real problem with this new approach for narrating my walks is that I dehydrate faster. I think if I’m going to continue to do this, I am going to have to carry my bigger purse with two bottles of water. I’m also getting hungry.

I sort of do this modified intermittent fasting thing. I don’t want to fast too often or too regularly because I think my body might get used to having fewer calories on certain days. Instead, my second day off of work for the weekend, I eat breakfast and then go for a long walk until I’m really hungry. And I’m really hungry.

I think this building here that I’m passing is the International Center. This is where the barges used to be stored. Anyway I am standing here by the water and I can see the place where the barges used to come and go from underneath the building. I think there may be other boats there now, but I’m not sure.

Do you know how long it took me to figure out where this old marina was? I had been reading directions and descriptions and destinations and hitting Google maps and all this other nonsense. I don’t remember where Thomas said it was, but I could never see where the boats would come out of that building.

Now I’m crossing another flood bridge. This is the one closest to the main touristy part of the Riverwalk. I’ve found a lot of lost people at the foot of this bridge. They end up unsure which direction the people are in.

I’m walking past a bunch of hotels. Nothing too exciting here. I mean, I like hotels, but the historically important hotels are, well, not here. Additionally, there’s a dilapidated building here that I’ve seen, but I’ve never really looked at before. I need to go to the surface someday and see if the front of the building looks any better. It’s probably a palace.

One of the hotels I’m passing is a Holiday Inn My father-in-law and his second wife stayed here in one of their visits. Then on the left again, next to the dilapidated building, is the Book Building. Thomas and I were very disappointed the first time we noticed it to find that it had nothing to do with books. It seems to have been designed by an architect whose name was Book.

And then on my right just before the Houston Street Bridge we have the Hotel Valencia on my right. Wow. I don’t remember what was here when I first moved to San Antonio. I need to get off my butt and get a damn GoPro or equivalent so that I can take movies of what downtown looks like today, so that in 20 years I’m not, “there used to be something else there. I don’t remember what.” I’m kicking myself for not getting one earlier, but, like they say about investing, the best time was yesterday. The second-best time is now.

*I looked it up and it looks like it might have been built in 1993. It looks way old for that, though. I guess it’s time for more research.

** And I call myself a history buff. This walk was on the anniversary of the Battle of the Alamo. I think that might have been where the arrows were leading.

***As I went to sleep that night, I realized what it looked like (granted, I didn’t have my glasses on, so . . . . It looked like what you’d see if you covered beggar’s lice in an orange tomato sauce, kind of like Spaghetti Os and then looked at it through a magnifying glass.

****I’m editing this on the evening of my next weekday off. I ended up having Popeye’s for lunch with my dad and then going to Friedrich Wilderness Park with Evelyn. I spent the evening crocheting and working on my Mandarin. So maybe I’ll do that on my next second day off.

Today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link is The Bone Shard Daughter, by Andrea Stewart. The Bone Shard Daughter is set in a world where the major form of magic are constructs animated by shards of bone. Lin, daughter of the Emperor, is forbidden to learn the bone shard magic. Nevertheless, she is trying to learn it in secret. She is in competition with her father’s protege, Bayan, for her father’s esteem. There are three other narrators and their stories intertwine, telling the story of an empire that is falling apart.

Walk on the Riverwalk, March 6, 2022, Part 2

I am still in the King William District approaching the Johnson Street Bridge. The pillars on the Johnson Street bridge were originally somewhere else. I’m so embarrassed. I usually know these things off the top my head.

I’ve crossed the Johnson Street Bridge and I took a brief water Pokémon Go (there’s a gym here), and research break and learned that the pillars on the Johnson Street were originally on the original Commerce Street Bridge. The Commerce Street Bridge was moved to Johnson Street. At the very least, the finials are still there. One site (bridgehunter.com) says that this is a new bridge built in the 1980s, but the Austin Chronicle says that the current bridge dates back to the time when O. Henry lived in San Antonio. I may have to go back to the bridge and look for makers’ marks or something to get to the bottom of this.

There are stairs here but I like to take the ramp. Funny, I was walking with Alex one day and I could not remember the word ramp to save my life. I ended up calling it the escalator. I tell people that if I have a stroke nobody will know because I use the wrong words so often.

N.B.: I’m not sure what happened to this next section because I seem to jump back and forth between the next two topics, so I had to try to recreate the paragraphs from what I can recall from the walk.

Just after the Johnson Street Bridge is the headquarters for the San Antonio River System which has some interpretive signage and these cisterns to collect rainwater outside. It also has a nice little half-wall that is a good place to sit down for a while.

Next up is the Pioneer Flour Mill, which was originally the CH Guenther Mill. This is a really pretty building and one of my friends who is very gifted photographer took such a nice picture of it once. I am also taking a picture of it, but it won’t be nearly as good as hers.

The Pioneer Flour Mill, 2022

I accidentally started a block and now can’t make it go away. So hi there!

So just realized I always had some pictures of how you get from the Riverwalk to the Witte Museum. It’s not as easy as you would think from the signs saying that the Riverwalk goes from Mission Espada in the south to the Witte Museum in the North. The main problem is the Brackenridge Golf Course. The river goes through the golf course, but it’d be too dangerous to have a walking path through it.

So maybe that’s something I could do. I could walk north from the Pearl to the Witte Museum and post my pictures. I’d have to figure out how to make the images work, though. Once upon a time I would have done this with an HTML table with the text in the left column and the pictures in the right column, but I can’t get a table to work in WordPress. I’ll have to wrestle with this idea.

Next door to the Pioneer Flour Mill is a breakfast place called the Guenther House. My mother-in-law took us to breakfast there once and it was really good. I need to go back sometime.

I suspect that a lot of the words I can’t understand might be “doggo.” So many people are walking their dogs on the Riverwalk. Just so many adorable puppers.

I am at the Blue Star Arts Complex and took a break to drink some water and I realized how little water I have. It’s now time to turn around.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time! Today we have Catherine House, by Elisabeth Thomas. Catherine House is a post-secondary school that isn’t a college or university but that fills the same spot. Presumably it qualifies you for, for example, law school, in the same way a university would. The only issue is that while the education only takes three years, students are not allowed to leave campus for that entire three years. Creepy and atmospheric and just so good. At least I enjoyed it. You might, too.

Walk on the Riverwalk, August 6, 2022, Part 1

It’s funny, I have had such a terrible case of writers block lately but I  also haven’t been thinking much about travel or anything like it for a while. Once upon a time I was thinking about how one of the things I wanted to do with this space was give tours of the San Antonio Area.

It just hit me as I’m walking down the Riverwalk and am almost under the Cesar Chavez bridge, that I could narrate my walks on the Riverwalk. It would give me some new content and also a little glimpse into San Antonio and its history.

I am almost at Cesar Chavez and am passing a transmission antenna for I believe it’s a radio station but this location is where the first Spanish language television station in the country came from. KWEX-TV was the home of the Univision Spanish-language network.

I enjoy pointing out to people by the way that the “red” stripes on those antennas are actually orange. I was very surprised when I started working in broadcasting way back in the Jurassic era to find that out. At first, I thought it was a mistake on the FCC paperwork because they sure look red when compared with blue sky, but when you get closer, you realize that they are orange.

I just crossed under the Cesar Chavez bridge. Now we are officially in the King William district. Back in the 1800s Prince Karl of Solms-Braunfels brought a bunch of German settlers to Texas. They settled out where New Braunfels is now and they set up farms. Some became very wealthy and they moved into the city of San Antonio and built themselves mansions. This area was originally called “Koenig Wilhelm” after about King William of Prussia.

I saw a policeman riding a motorcycle down the other side of the Riverwalk. I don’t know what that’s about. He didn’t have his lights on or anything.

Later some bicyclists who were listening to music went down that side and I can’t understand what my version of Dragon Anywhere picked up there.  It came out as “But I just saw you were here right now.” I don’t even know.

As I pass under Arsenal Street, this is a nice place to walk in the fall because there’s, like, a lot of red oaks and a lot of cypresses and stuff and in the fall, they lose their leaves and if you time it just right, there’ll be leaves on the sidewalk and you can shuffle through them a lot like I’m back home in Chicago.

Okay. So back to King William. When World War I came and suddenly the Germans were the enemy so they temporarily named King William Street as Pershing Street and after the war they restored the name King William, but for whatever reason, they translated it, rather than

Most of the German settlers were Catholic and they got upset with the fact that San Fernando Cathedral was, well, I guess it might have just been a parish church at the time, was so heavily Hispanic, so they got their own German Catholic Church. This is St. Joseph’s, over by what used to be the Joskes and then was the Dillards at the Rivercenter mall. And now I’m not sure what is in there now.* I’ll have to go and see what in there now. It’s been a while.

Anyway the deal that they struck they would never sell the land the church was built on, so as the Joskes wanted to expand, they are had to build around the church on three sides. The people who celebrated mass at that church lived down here in the King William district.

Right now I am across the river from the headquarters for the HEB grocery chain which was normally probably talk about that another time.

Another thing that a lot of families did down here was milling. I’m passing right through what used to be Gunther’s upper mill I took a picture of the historical marker. I should post it when I get home and post this. I’m getting a little winded narrating and walking at the same time. Also my purse is kind of heavy. It has a big 20 ounces water bottle and the extra charging battery for my phone.

The historical marker for Guenter’s Upper Mill, San Antonio Riverwalk, 2022

I was rereading some of things I wrote and I may have to edit this quite a bit because I got something about “awaiting an actual statement.” I don’t know what I could have been saying that Dragon Anywhere would interpret as “awaiting an actual statement.”

I’m going to post this and then start working on what “Listener Genzyme” means. I might post the next chunk for tomorrow, it might take me a little longer than that to sort this next section out.

Today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link is The Winterbourne Home for Vengeance and Valor. Amazing book, not crazy about the title. The Winterbourne Home for Vengeance and Valor is the tale of April, who has one prized possession, a key with a crest on it. A crest that she sees on objects belonging to the Winterbourne family when she is at the art museum on a field trip. Her key is somehow connected to the Winterbourne family, but how?

*I do know that there’s an H&M in that building now, but I don’t think that takes up the entire space. Let’s go be the oldest person in an H&M! That sounds like fun!

I Went Downtown Tonight (November 1, 2021)

I sat around all day, working on my reading and writing blog posts (this is my fourth post for today, and will go live on November 5), but not getting any exercise, or any reading on The Eye of the World.

I was so close to having The Eye of the World finished and I figured that a trip from my house to the Pearl and then walking downtown from the Pearl and then reversing the trip should be enough time to finish The Eye of the World and, just maybe, get started on The Great Hunt. And it was, too. Yay!

I was a little nervous a couple of times during my walk, but I mostly enjoyed the walk. I saw a couple of Christmas trees while I was out and about, but mostly it felt like a nice, autumnal evening.

I enjoy taking night photographs in the city because the play of light and shadow is so interesting. During the daytime around here, everything’s so bright. We get an occasional darkly overcast day, which makes photography interesting, but mostly it’s just . . . sunny.

Tonight’s picture of the Alamo. There were people standing in front taking family photos, so I decided to get an angled shot for this one.

Unfortunately, even after all of that walking, I’m still 2,000 steps short and it’s 10:45 at night. Let’s see if I can knock some of that out before bedtime (which is about an hour away).

New Theme. Is it a Keeper?

I stuck the picture that Alex liked better in as my header image. I think it’s kind of busy, personally, but it might grow on me.

I’m working on getting a good picture of the Arsenal Street Bridge with the Pioneer Flour Mill in the background to see how he likes that. He liked this image because it wasn’t just a bridge and thus is more “travel”-y.

I think that I’m too short to get the picture I want, though. Maybe I can get Alex to drop me and the stepstool that we refer to as the “fish stairs”* off there and go around the block while I take a picture from a slightly higher elevation. Or, even better, maybe we could find a place to park and we could walk down there together, so he can keep me from getting so wrapped up in getting the perfect picture that I fall off the stepstool and break my leg or, worse, fall off the stepstool and into the river.

Will I be able to do this before the end of the COVID-19 outbreak? Will I need to wait until the outbreak is over? I look it up pretty much daily and everything I read says that outdoor recreation is still acceptable, even for people in the most locked-down areas of the US, like in San Francisco, just as long as you don’t get too close to strangers. Going out with people in your family is still acceptable. I guess that if I could get Alex to go with me during a work day or very, very early on a Sunday when we’re not likely to bump into strangers we could do it.

Of course, both Alex and I are “essential workers” right now. This means that we both have to go to work until we get infected. Alex is working for a restaurant with a drive-through, so he’s providing people with food. I’m a pharmacy technician and providing people with medical care. So I guess we’ll see if/when we get this thing.

Oh! A new-today discovery about COVID-19! It seems that one of the first signs of the illness is a decrease in ability to taste and smell. This may also be a symptom of a subclinical case (one that never develops really obvious symptoms). So I guess I need to keep something with a strong taste or smell around and test myself daily just in case. I had Indian food for dinner and could taste and smell it just fine, so yay!

Crap. I’m not sure what to do about my Gratuitous Amazon Link. Amazon has announced that they’re going to stop accepting non-essentials in their warehouses. I still want to hopefully be able to make a few cents (and maybe someday dollars) from this, so I hesitate to skip the Gratuitous Amazon Link. However, choosing an “essential” might not work long-term. And what would I pick? N95 masks? That might be useful for anyone who stumbles across my blog right now (and can wait until April 14 for it), but long run, maybe not. Maybe an electronic delivery. A downloaded music album, maybe? A Kindle book? Is clothing an essential? I’ve got it! Lupin Leaps In, by Georgia Dunn, the creator of the Breaking Cat News comic strip. Hers isn’t really the sort of small business that is likely to be affected by COVID-19, but a small business it is, and we really should support it.

* I had to stand on it to take care of Alex’s aquarium when he was little.

San Antonio Parks: Cathedral Rock Nature Park

Okay, so you turn off of Grissom Road into the little parking lot at Cathedral Rock and see a little play area and a little picnic pavilion.

Cathedral Rock Playground, 2018
The playground at Cathedral Rock taken from a creative angle again because I didn’t want to risk getting any of the kids playing nearby in the picture

You walk a little farther and find this:

Cathedral Rock Park path
A path at Cathedral Rock Park.

And then a little farther on you find this:

Cathedral Rock Park Map
A map of Cathedral Rock Park

And you realize that there’s quite a lot of park to explore here. I focused on the corner of the map for the picture above because Cathedral Rock Park is also a trailhead for the Leon Creek Greenway and the Greenway takes up most of the map.

I took a lot of pictures here and don’t know how many I’ll use. I think there are actually more paths at Cathedral Rock than are pictured on that map, because I was following the map on Pokémon Go rather than using that map and almost all of the paths that they had on the game were there in the park (the only exception I can think of is I think it might be that loop there in the upper-left-hand corner looks like it comes straight back from the lower-left part and rejoins the main path in kind of a reverse D-shape rather than that lasso kind of shape it has on this map).

Most of the paths have the San Antonio trail levels assigned to them, where Level 1 and 2 are usable by people in wheelchairs and Level 3 is usable by really incredibly fit people in wheelchairs and Level 4 is probably not usable by people in wheelchairs. Some of the signs showing which level applies to which paths were in pretty bad shape when I was there and could use some replacement signs.

Finally, why Cathedral Rock? Beats me. The park itself is mostly level with the occasional scattered bits of limestone. Once you get to the greenway, though, you find this:

Cathedral Rock?
Is this “Cathedral Rock”?

Which is way more impressive than it looks in the photo. Maybe if the deer had stood there while I took my picture rather than freaking out and running away it’d look less uninspiring.

Now I guess it’s time for a gratuitous Amazon link. I looked at books about limestone, since the rocks of what I assume is Cathedral Rock are limestone, but, eh. So I went back to the same link as I used before and dug up Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail: Washington: Section Hiking from the Columbia River to Manning Park by Tami Asars. I’m not planning on going on the Pacific Crest Trail anytime soon, but the picture on the front sure is pretty and it has 4.9 stars (out of 5) so why not?