San Antonio - memorial weekend

Oops, just realised that I didn't tell you about San Antonio, which was last weekend. It is actually only an hour away by car, and is a really nice city. It has a lovely walk along the river that runs through the city, the walk is about 20 feet below street level and has lots of lovel trees providing shade, and is full of tourists, restuarants, and boats. It provides some relief from the heat, and is definitely worth going to see. Here is a picture I took from a cafe on the side, we couldn't quite figure out why this boat has an avalanche-risk flag on the back, none of the rest of them did.

It was allegedly a chilli-queen festival that weekend, so we wandered over to the market square to take a look. It was set up in a very festive manner, but I think we were too early, there didn't appear to be much chilli

We then got stuck in a Texas 'shower' - the heavens opened and there was a torrent of rain for about 15 minutes. We hid under an overhang of the Hilton hotel and laughed at passers-by getting soaked.

We then visited the Alamo, the story of the battle is pretty impressive, but there isn't that much left of it to see, I think it disappoints a lot of Americans because of that. For those of you who don't know, the Alamo was originally a mission, hence the churchy feel of the outside.

But driving up to our barbeque later that afternoon, we were hit by some more rain, and it wasn't so funny this time. We couldn't see anything out the window (and unfortunately were driving at 60 along the highway at the time) and the rain turned to hail and caused a couple of dings in the windscreen. Here is a photo of all the cars parked on the hardshoulder under a bridge, they just stopped there, there was no real warning it was going to happen, which was quite scary! It could have been because they couldn't see anything, but possibly more to stop the hail denting the cars. We felt it would be rude not to join them! 15 minutes later, the rain had reverted to the type in the first photo, which we now think of as just a light drizzle, and everyone got on their way again. Madness!