Sunday, January 20, 2008

We had a lovely dinner last night with Cookie and Ron. They took us to a steakhouse not too far away - good food and better company. When we finished dinner we went on a night tour of San Antonio - quite a lovely city. We enjoyed catching up with family chat, etc. We will be going to Fredricksburg with them on Wednesday. We picked up Justine at the airport today - getting there was no problem, but getting back was quite a chore as the exit we needed to take to get on the correct road was blocked off. We eventually found a gas station and got directions to the right road. We got Justine settled in to the hotel and then walked down to the Riverwalk and got tickets to the IMAX movie about the Alamo (many people had suggested watching the movie to make the site more meaningful). After the show we went into the Alamo and toured around looking at all of the exhibits and displays - amazingly about 3 million people visit the Alamo each year. We came out of one building and chanced into a ranger who was giving a very animated lecture on the Alamo - he was very good. We then went through the last exhibit and at the end we were able to catch the last showing of a 15 minute piece put together by the History Channel. It was nice to have all three of these explanations (IMAX, lecture, and History Channel) as I felt that I learned a little bit more with each retelling of the story. We were getting hungry so we went down to the Riverwalk and found a lovely restaurant (but ate inside as it was getting chilly again) - we had a great Mexican dinner and walked back to the hotel. Justine called her cousin who lives in Austin and we are going to meet him for dinner on Tuesday night. It is fun to combine the tourist thing with seeing family. We made a couple of plans for tomorrow depending on the weather - there seems to be a chance of showers most of the week - we will finalize our plans at breakfast tomorrow.