San Antonio, Part 2: The Alamo and Other Stuff

After our marathon day at Seaworld, we headed out the next day to Natural Bridge Caverns. While Mike waited in line (yes more lines!) for our tickets, I took the girls to go panning for gemstones. You could buy bags of dirt that had gemstones inside. They would use the little panning baskets and pick out their treasures. They are real gemstones and they gave you a card to identify the stones with. They seemed to really enjoy this activity except Kaitlyn sometime between here and the end of the cavern lost her gemstones. Oh well. 

As for the cavern, it was created from a giant sinkhole. Here is a "natural" bridge that was left after the sinkhole.

They said it was about 3/4 mile of walking inside. It was cool and drippy most of the time. Lots of railings to hold onto. I thought the whole thing was really cool. The kids were less impressed after a day at Seaworld but I actually enjoyed it a lot.

We continued through, but once you got down you had to get back up. That was quite strenuous, and hot! But after the 2 mile hike those kids did last summer I felt like this was easy in spite of having to climb back up.

After a nice lunch and several spilled drinks, we went to this cute little dinosaur playground outside.

After the caverns we drove a hop, skip, and a jump to Natural Bridge Wildlife Park. It took an hour just to get our car through the gates, and this was in the afternoon already! It's a drive-through wildlife park. Most of the animals come up to your car while you give them food out your window. Except they weren't really hungry after being fed by everyone in Texas for an entire day. Still there were a few that were interested.

First we saw buffalo roaming free. They didn't come over by the car but I thought that was pretty cool. Definitely not something we ever see around here.

This lovely ram seemed to like us. Hello!

And we saw an elk.

An ostrich.

There quite a few hoofed animals. Not exactly my favorite but they were fine. But wouldn't you know it, we finally decided to pass some of the cars that were stopped because all the animals were just more of the same, but as we were passing we realized some zebras were stopping at the cars. Except now we were in the passing lane and had to keep going. It was neat though to see them running around.

The funniest thing (to me anyway) was how the kids were supposed to take the animal feed, stick their hands out the window, and drop it on the ground. We reiterated this several times. Our mini van is not equipped though with a third row of windows. So the kids in back had to double up with the kids in the middle. And of course their windows don't go all the way down. And of course our over-excited kids, especially the ones who were not right next to the window, in spite of our instructions, took the feed and just threw it from inside the car. Of course at least half of it hit the window and went everywhere all over the car. It honestly didn't bother me. You should have seen how dirty our car was anyway. But dear hubby was less amused. I just had to laugh! Even funnier after several times and they were still doing it! (The smoke was starting to come out of Mike's ears.) They finally got the hang of it though. Our plan was just to have the kids switch seats halfway through but that never really happened. They all just smushed into the middle.

That night we finally made it back to our hotel for the outdoor movie Toy Story 3 (same as the night we checked in - you'd think they could play more than one movie) and s'mores on the outdoor fire pits. And the next morning checked out and headed back to downtown San Antonio.

First we went to the Tower of Americas, take 2, actually. We tried after the riverwalk but decided an hour wait was too long just to ride up to the top and back. Wednesday was much better. The picture is from our first attempt though. It has one of those rotating restaurants as well as a lookout deck up at the top.

Here are me and three Reagans at the top looking out at the city. Pardon how messy I look - it was quite windy!

And Kaitlyn with a decent view behind her...

Ashley looking like the infamous Marilyn Monroe picture, except for the bunny ears...

And actually probably the best part is they had one of those 4D movies - Flying Over Texas or something like that. This picture totally cracks me up! It was a pretty good flick - most memorable part was the rodeo bull "snot" that flew out at us (aka water). That was pretty gross but worth a good laugh!

And who can take their kids to San Antonio and not go to the Alamo?  Again, RIDICULOUS lines. Since Mike and I have been more than once and know there's not a whole lot actually in there, and know that are kids don't know much about it and will doubtfully find it interesting, we opted to just take a few pictures and walk around the grounds.

You'd think we'd been walking for days. They couldn't even enjoy the beautiful grounds, which would normally be right up their alley. Instead here is what they looked like. Mike decided to join in for the effect.

We decided it was time to go. And thus sums up our San Antonio vacation!