Category Archives: Texas

adventure, Attractions, Outdoors, Pennsylvania, Texas

Bridge Bats and River Walks

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We traveled up to Austin, to see Zilker Gardens and the close-by Barton Springs, as well as the famous Congress Street bridge.  The night we returned to San Antonio, we met our guardian angel, Rebar.

But back to Austin. What are all these people doing, on a bridge at dusk on a weeknight? photo(25) An unintended consequence of a bridge improvement project years ago yielded a habitat ideal for migrating bats, that is now the largest urban bat population in the country.  The Bat Flight. From the end of March, locals and tourists gather for a dazzling natural display, as the bats take wing at dusk to feed.

On the advice of a camping friend from Michigan, we also dined at the Casa Riophoto(26) on the famous Riverwalk in San Antonio, accompanied by mariachi music, and hundreds of grackles and other birds, dive bombing for scraps! An enchanting setting in a jewel of a town!

We also caught up with a former Greenbelter and member of the Crescent-Ridge Playground Gang, Sherry.  She has made a life in San Antonio, and genuinely loves her adopted town.

Our car is now safely back with us, and seems to be running fine again.  Next stop, Carlsbad!

Attractions, People, Texas

Where the Ghosts Dance

San Antonio is an interesting oyster–not much to see from the outside, dazzling on the inside.  We took the kids down to experience the Alamo. You round a maze of parking garages and high rise hotels and wham! It’s just there. The iconic front wall of the simple church that was never meant to fortify anything.photo(22)

Like Gettysburg and Antietam and other geographic accidents of history, it’s a place for reflection and pause. The signs remind you: no hats on men, keep your voice low, no photographs.  Here is the place where, as Colonel William Barrett Travis said to the “People of Texas & All Americans in the World”:

   The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily & will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days.  If this call is neglected, I am determined  to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor & that of his country. Victory or Death.

It is hard to imagine in 2014 a former Congressman stepping over the line in the sand to stand alongside him facing certain death.  But Davie Crockett did just that, after an election loss where he famously told the people of his district, “you might go to hell, but I am going to Texas.”

And it raises questions in older men’s minds about what one might have done in a similar situation. Travis was 26, his whole life at his feet. What is worth offering a life dearly for?  Having once been admonished, “Don’t tell me what you believe. Tell me what you do all day and I’ll tell you what you believe,” would I have stepped across the famous “line”?  It’s good to think on these things occasionally.

It seephoto(24)med so fitting that our last night in San Antonio was a party in the shadow of the Alamo. It is a place one can easily imagine the  ghosts dancing.

adventure, People, Texas

San Antonio, City of (At Least One) Angels

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Last night we were on our way back from Austin, after watching a bat exodus (more to follow), and our Dodge Caravan overheated about three miles from our KOA in San Antonio.  What followed was a series of events alien to my grown-up life: summoning a tow truck, trying to locate a taxi, trying to figure out where we were at an unfamiliar exit ramp in an unfamiliar town, and this morning, trying to decipher the baffling code of a city bus schedule.

Enter Rebar.  Rebar (I checked the spelling) is a tow truck operator in San Antonio.  When he arrived on scene last night, first he made sure that we would get back to camp ok  . Us being me, Jen, our three boys, and Shadow, our faithful dog.  Rebar said if we needed a place to stay, we could crash at his apartment.  He offered the kids chips from a bag he had in the cab.

Sometimes it takes a burp in one’s plans to realize how much goodness there is in the world.  Rebar is four months in the country from Kurdistan.  He speaks four languages, and his formal English is much better than mine. He fled Iraq finally, where he’d worked as an English translator for the U.S. Army.  Something about extremely short career expectations.

Now he is in San Antonio, learning his way around, and grateful to be here.  And so, need I add, are we.  At this hour, I don’t know what will become of the work on the car.  Will we have to end the trip to pay for a new engine? Were we mistaken to tow our car? Will we have to drive it from now on, and try to sell a tow dolly?  I hope not.

But we met an angel last night, in the midst of trying and failing to find a cab to come to the part of town we’d broken down.  I had the sensation, talking to Rebar, of reading The Life of Pi, and wondering, at the end, how much of Piscene’s tale was true, and how much was fanciful fiction designed to weave a more exciting tale, and in the case of Rebar, to maybe reap a better tip.

I prefer to believe in angels. Rebar is one.  That’s what my kids remember about our cramped, late-night drive,  and there is more than enough danger in the world for me to worry that they’ll arrive as adults overly innocent.  So thanks, Angel Rebar.  Welcome to America, and I hope you continue to be yourself here, for our sake.