Texas Day 5: San Antonio, the Missions

On our last day in Texas, we went back to San Antonio to see the rest of the missions before heading to the airport that afternoon. We'd already seen the Alamo, but there were four more to see.

First up was the San Jose mission, by far the prettiest and most popular with local schools.

Mission San Jose was the most restored and had a complete fort surrounding it. The other Missions' fort walls had eroded away.

The fort entrance.

 Cacti growing on top of a wall.

The church.

An old well.

Not your modern day stove.

The front of the church. At each mission we visited, there were people doing restoration on the old buildings.

The mill.

I believe this type of decoration used to cover the entire buliding.

The famous rose window. I'd never heard of this before we visited the Mission, but everything we read called it famous.

This Mission's church still held a service on Sunday mornings. This is the interior of the church.

A look at the church from the back side.

And this is where the Indians stayed.

Next, we went to Mission San Juan. It was under a lot of construction. We couldn't get in the church or a very good picture of it because of all the construction equipment, but there was this  cross surrounded by cacti in the middle of the fort walls.

Then we headed to Mission Espada.

There are still residents in the old homes part of the Mission. And these residents had beautiful flowers.

Hi!

The last Mission for the day was Mission Concepcion, just south of downtown San Antonio.

Like the San Jose Mission, this church still holds service there on Sundays.

After seeing all of the Missions that morning, we headed downtown to kill time before heading for the airport. We enjoyed another very long walk along the Riverwalk, seeing parts of the city that we missed on the Riverwalk Boat Tour.

A mosaic of the city built into a wall running along the river.

The ugly duckling. I called it a dalmation duck. Kyler told me it was an albino duck, but not quite. Either way, neither one of us had ever seen anything like it.

A pretty fountain along the river.

An old church-looking building we stumbled upon when we came up from the Riverwalk onto the streets.

We loved our trip to San Antonio. It was the perfect combination of sight-seeing, relaxing at Mark and Alli's house, and spending time with the kids (and Mark and Alli).

We had such a great time, and it was the perfect getaway in March. Even though we've had such a mild winter here in Indiana, it was wonderful to get away to high 70s and even a day of the 80s in Texas.

The entire trip was an absolute blast until we got ready to leave San Antonio. Without going into all the boring details, our plane had a couple of electrical issues, once in San Antonio and again in Dallas. We ended up getting home at 2 am. But if that was the worst part of the trip, than we'll consider the whole thing a success!

Oh yeah, right after we left Mark and Alli's house for the final time, I realized I hadn't given Alli her house key back. So while I ran inside to return it, Kyler snapped these couple of pictures of their home.

One day, Mark turned on the hot tub, and he, the kids, and Kyler got in it that night. It was cold outside, but that didn't stop them. In fact, Blaise and Ethan were jumping into the pool and then hopping back into the hot tub. Silly kids.

I loved the back side of their house. So full of windows and doors. You could see what was going on in the back yard from the living room, kitchen, dining room, and play room.