Travelin’ Thornberries Riverwalk to San Antonio--Part II

Friday, October 12, 2007 — Tenemos el Jet Lag

Yes, Jennifer’s Spanish lessons can give voice to the day in a way my yet-crude Latin cannot.

San Antonio witnessed a plane giving birth to a couple of ripe Thornberries. Yes, other than a futile attempt to wash our faces using the restroom sinks and nearly empty soap dispensers, we weren’t able to do much about our hygiene. All of our supplies were in a cart or the belly of a plane somewhere. We could only hope it was the plane we had just exited.

Fortune finally stopped butt-plungering us at this point. We collected our luggage from the baggage claim without any major mishaps. We located phones to call the Hilton and they dispatched a transport bus. I knew it was going to be a painful trip when I sought to confirm with the driver that we were in the right place, and the little punk said, “I dunno. Are you?” [Sigh]. At this point, I really didn’t care what hotel he found for us, or if he went home afterward and shot himself in the head. All I wanted was a room and delicious sleep.

Our transport driver, demonstrating every bit of his human intelligence level.

Fortunately, I had recommended before we left our home airport that Jennifer call the Hilton and confirm our reservations so they didn’t cancel them. Our room was ready when we arrived and we got the room keys. But before we went up to them, I asked Jennifer for a little more patience while I sought out the ASCH conference people. I’m sure they’ve heard every sob story for why someone misses their scheduled time, so I thought if I presented my ragged, rank, stubbly self exactly as I had walked off the plane after a night in the airport, it might score me a few points. The ASCH assistant took one look at me and told me to go to bed. Happy to oblige.

The Hotel Hilton, Airport

Well, we may have paid 136% and then missed the first night, but somehow, I think we still got our money’s worth. They had placed us on what they called the “Executive Level.” Essentially, it was the top four floors of the hotel. It came with a complimentary access to a study, free breakfast, a computer for getting on the Internet and a team of attractive young, nubile, scantily clad people to perform “escort” services on…er, um…for us. Okay, perhaps not that last one, but they did give us the royal treatment, especially when our only point of reference on this trip was a hard floor plagued by zombies. We had to have our electronic room cards with us any time we got on the elevator because only those with “Executive Access” could get to those upper rooms. Wow. Call us the Throne-berries.

Insofar as the room itself, they might have put it on a mountaintop next to a gibbering lama, but the accommodations themselves were comparable to most other hotels where we’ve stayed. Pay-per-view on television, desks, a few complimentary items like bottled water. No liquor cabinet like the J.W. Marriott in Atlanta and no refrigerator like the Drury Inn in St. Louis. Still, that vast king-sized bed was all I had the eyes to peruse. And then neither of us saw anything except our own eyelids….

His and Hers; Hypnosis and Huffing

Jennifer and I woke two hours later, mercifully freshened up and grabbed some food downstairs in the hotel’s café before the conference attendees belly-flopped themselves in front of us. We would later learn that in addition to ASCH, there were a couple of other professional organizations holding conferences. One was a group of well-dressed Pentecostals, singing the praises of the Lord and getting themselves baptized by the active Holy Spirit. The other was a group of naturalists. So the place was crowded, and we just barely squeaked our way in front of one group looking for loaves and fishes and the other for worms and twigs.

Afterward, we went our separate ways, me to finally get to the latter half of the conference, Jennifer to do…whatever it was she did. We’ll split the story off here and let you follow her thread.

Jennifer’s Experiences:

“I spent my afternoon doing what any self-respecting health nut does after spending a night crunched up on an airport floor … I went down to the hotel’s fitness center for a workout. It felt remarkably good to work the kinks out of my muscles. It felt so good, in fact, that I worked my body for almost two hours! That’s much longer than I stay at the gym at home. Not much else to say here, except to comment on how nice the hotel’s fitness facility was. It was equipped with two or three treadmills and stair climbers, a full set of dumbbells, a few benches, and a couple of ab balls. It also had a mat and large mirror, which were very nice for some vigorous yoga poses.

Feeling much better, I went back up to the room to get ready to go out to dinner with Thomas. Despite my swearing not to do so, I dozed off for a short nap, then roused myself and took a shower, got dressed and studied mi espanol until he returned.

Thomas will pick back up with the story of our evening together 'on the town:'”

The North Star Mall

The Hilton Hotel was across the highway from the pretty fairly sized North Star Mall. After Jennifer caught me up on the respective experiences detailed above, we had hopes of moseying over to investigate said mall and grabbing some grub. Originally, we thought we might just cross the highway and walk over, but after several hours in San Antonio, we realized that would be nigh impossible. The highway was multi-lane and heavy with traffic at all times. There was also construction going on, of course. We always seem to visit places that are being built or renovated. Neither of us was keen on the idea of playing a high-stakes game of Frogger where the loser ended up as pink squishy stuff beneath some Texas cowboy’s Good Year treads. That meant waiting for the hotel’s transport van. Fortunately, it arrived right on time and we got there with no difficulty. We had two hours to enjoy ourselves before the van came back for the return trip.

Of course you know there would have to be a stampede of humanity oozing its way around us, so Jennifer and I found ourselves prodding people out of the way or luring them off the main route of the mall with handfuls of fescue and oats. Only a brief exploration of this one-story palette of shopping splats, and Jennifer and I finally realized that it held few options for dining that weren’t in the open food court. We ended up returning to the place way back at the point we had entered, one known as Luby’s. It was basically a buffet place, where you pick up a tray and then tell the glassy-eyed, slack-jawed employees behind the counter which entrees and side dishes you want. I selected a pretty tasty ensemble that was a bit luke-warm, but otherwise palatable. It included ‘shrooms, which generally make any dish, including ice cream, better for me. Jennifer, on the other hand, suffered loud and long. Her dinner looked like someone in the kitchen has pulled the nozzle on it and let all of the air out of it. Flat, bland and roadkill-esque, she wasn’t even able to better it with butter and other condiments because each packet grabbed her plastic knife and forced her to duel it before it would submit to having its splattery viscera pasted on her culinary crap. At least it filled her stomach, even if that was all it did.

The mall itself was a vast enterprise, a honeycomb of capitalism that would have Karl Marx rolling around in his 124-year old grave. Overall, it was so filled with shops, restaurants, kiosks, service providers and colorful lights that it would have required a dedicated shopper to spend five or six hours moving through it.

Eh.

Jennifer and I burned through it in about 45 minutes.

We’ve noted in previous narratives that we’re just not big shoppers. Sure, these malls tend to be huge. But once we weed out the chain stores that we have back at home, then go back and throw out the teeny-bopper places with their hot pink thongs and recycled boot-cut low-riders, then scratch off the frivolous places like “Leather ‘R’ Us,” and finally trim out the high-priced places that are affiliates of places we have at home, there really isn’t much left that captures our interest. Jennifer and I mainly just wanted a nice dinner (so much for that), and a coffee from Starbucks. We usually hold out hope for encountering something truly unique at these malls and I did briefly check out a game store. But I found it full of teenage “steers” (as opposed to the “cows” of home), and in general, my X-Box was just too old to run most of what they sold. There was a cheap, “old fogie” rack of games, but they were generally things that were so uninteresting that I remembered why I never bought them years ago.

Oh, there were interesting features in the mall itself. Various places in the court area had cans of food or boxes stacked in such ways that they made neat sculptures.

This "Great Pump'can" sculpture from Mall of America illustrates some the design concept the Travelin' Thornberries saw at the North Star Mall.

One I remember in particular was shaped like a giant stiletto shoe. But otherwise, it was stuff we had seen before, stuff covered with a wall of human Texas beef vast enough to even answer the question of that old woman who worked in Wendy’s commercials back in the mid-1980s.

Several minutes and handfuls of distributed fescue and oats later, we found our way back to the bench outside where we could wait peacefully for the return van to the hotel. Someone else from our hotel sat on the other side of the bench from us, but she was polite enough not to try to make conversation. Or maybe she was put off because I started reciting a never-ending plethora of classical Latin sentences, catching up from the missed time at the airport from the night before. remedium irae est mora! [The cure for anger is delay!]

Texas Beers

What more can we say? We caught the van back and swung by the hotel pub. There, we had a couple of local beers before retiring upstairs. All we did at that point was read a little, skim the television channels and go to bed.

Click for Part III