Saturday, October 13, 2007—Lost and Found and Lost
I rose early enough the next morning to find my way to the next phase of the conference. I’m not going to use a great deal of space here this time, as I’d rather leave the storyline predominantly for Jennifer to complete.
Solitary ‘Berry in SanAn
“I had decided before we left home that I wanted to see the San Antonio Botanical Garden. It’s not something Thomas would be very interested in, so it seemed like a good solo activity. All in all, it was fun, but like any travel adventure, it was not without its mishaps, nor its vacas (cows).
First, I had to figure out how to navigate the bus system. I had printed out some information before I left home, but being the skeptic that I am, I didn’t trust it, so I asked a friendly hotel employee at the front desk for some help. After a phone call to the bus company, he told me that the first step was to find the bus stop on Blanco Street, which was “right down there, at the stoplight.” So … of course, I walked a-a-a-l-l-ll the way around the block, drawing a blank on Blanco, before I finally spotted it. Unfortunately, I had missed the bus time I had written down. Rather than risk going off without proper information, I went a-a-a-l-l-ll the way back up to our little executive lounge and looked it up on the Internet, but of course that wouldn’t let me download PDFs of the bus routes. So I called the friendly customer service person at the bus company, got the rundown, set off back down to Blanco Street and caught my bus.
Luckily, the bus drivers were very tolerant of me when I told them I was a tourist and wanted to be sure of where to get off to make my transfer. They were glad to help me out, and I got to the Botanical Garden without further mishap.
There I was, the Botanical Berry, dancing among the trees and plants. I’ll not bore you with a detailed rundown of what I saw, but some of the highlights are worth noting. One was a Japanese garden, which had a nice little rock pond running through it, bamboo plants and shady trees. I also enjoyed the sensory garden, meant specifically to give the blind a full botanical experience. However, there was still plenty to see, touch and smell. I made my way up to the overlook, where I got a nice panoramic view of San Antonio, and wandered through the rose garden, which had plenty of beautiful colors and scents.The main lowlight was the muchas vacitas, or ‘many little cows.’ There was a family with a herd of small calves ambling through the Japanese garden. It was a nice, tranquil place, and my peace was quickly destroyed by the shrill lowing from the young ones.
[ABOVE]: Having captured the alien pod during our trip to Biloxi in July 2004, [BELOW]: Jennifer finds another otherworldly flora in San Antonio in October 2007.There was also some sort of Dora the Explorer maze through the formal garden, which was rendered all but unusable by me, the full-sized adult, who could not crawl through the little three-foot-high metal obstacles that had been placed in the walkways. I cursed the fact that a formal garden had been turned into a playground for kids, shrugged my shoulders and turned to get to my bus, which was due in just a few minutes.
I gazed at my bus schedule for the return trip and calculated that I would either just barely make my transfer bus, or have to wait twenty-eight of the thirty minutes between buses. Being a Thornberry, of course, I was betting on the longer wait. Once again, the friendly driver helped me get off at the right place. I settled myself in for half an hour on the hot, sunny bench, when what to my wondering eyes did appear but bus number two, minus the reindeer. I got back to the room a little early, a few minutes ahead of Thomas.
And now, back to Thomas’ narration to take you through the rest of the story!”
Riverwalk the Line
Jennifer and I once again stared doe-eyed at each other as we respectively told of our experiences above in bone-chilling, mind-expanding detail. Then came the decision of how to spend our last evening in San Antonio. Personally, I was prepared to just settle into the hotel and avail ourselves of its many amenities. We had sporadic access to email, so I didn’t feel quite so cut off from friends and family as in past trips (that’s you folks!), so we could have done much to communicate. Jennifer, however, wanted to venture out into the city and see the Paseo del Rio: the San Antonio Riverwalk. I was hesitant because we calculated that based on the bus ride and time to dine, we’d only really get thirty minutes of time at the Riverwalk before the last bus run that would bring us home.
I had to admit though, that my position in the discussion was causing me a touch of “existential guilt.” Basically, existential guilt is the sense of malaise one experiences when she or he is not living up to her or his full potential during a lifetime that goes ‘round only one time (unless you’re Hindu or Buddhist, I suppose). It is the sense of lost time and lost opportunity. En micro, I did sort of relate to Jennifer’s point that we had traveled more than a thousand miles to see the city, and it would be an opportunity lost if we hung around the room. So with her wanting to go and my wanting to stay, we compromised; we decided to go. ;)
As Jennifer’s account above indicated, she had previously scoped out the bus system, and she was confident we would be able to get out to the Riverwalk and back again without mishap. We hiked out to the right stop, climbed aboard the next bus and paid our $2 fee.
Right away, I was a bit unnerved. First of all, the trip was about forty minutes long. Second of all, I started to feel like we had crossed to the wrong side of the tracks somewhere along the way. There weren’t any bars on the windows of the homes we passed, and no one was using handguns with the identification numbers filed off, but the other passengers climbing onto the bus started taking on a considerably rougher, harsher, seedier look.
At one point, we had to vacate our seat because the driver had to flip it up to make that area wheelchair accessible for one of the boarding passengers. Bald and scruffy, the guy looked like he’d jumped onto a grenade to save his biker buddies in a militant gang rumble. The bouquet of roses he was selling made him seem…well, not one bit less intimidating. To the guy’s credit, he never said anything amiss or even talked to us at all. I think he made me nervous because he sat right in front of me and I was able to count the five wedge-like scars cut into the back of his shaved scalp. It looked like he’d gone a few rounds with a steel-beaked woodpecker…and lost.
Another group of passengers aboard included a very young Mexican-American couple. They looked to be around nineteen or twenty-something, and they had a child who appeared maybe two years old. And the girl was very pregnant and shaped like a potato with pencils shoved in the bottom of it for legs. Again, they never said anything to us, but I got the sense that if I had made eye contact, the young man might have taken offense and stabbed me. I cultivated a blank expression and stared past them out the bus window.
At last, the bus reached the right destination, and we stepped off of it to behold downtown San Antonio.
Eh.
Overall, it wasn’t that much different than downtown in other cities we’ve visited. It was characterized by a tangle of descending staircases that take pedestrians down to the famed Riverwalk. When we finally found our way down there, we say this little teeny stream, beside which many couples walked. The Rio Grande, the Paseo del Rio was not. A boat chugged by, stuffed with people and a tour guide. We've found someone else's video of the area at Youtube:
The place was peaceful in its own way, but this area was crawling with “steers” and there really wasn’t anywhere for Jennifer and I to stop and take in the view without having to crowd someone over the side of the concrete railings and into the water below. Tempting, but unwise. At one point, we ran into a cluster of well-dressed Texas “steers” all coordinating some kind of event—a marriage, funeral, save-the-whales karaoke, an Amish live birth—we really didn’t know or care. All we could determine was that they were in the way.
This is not to say it was an entirely unpleasant experience. No, there was nice foliage and flowers around the entire area, with birds flitting around, and the water did have a peaceful sound to it. We could see how it would be a nice hangout for young couples coming out for dating; it was a classy environment that did not take any great amount of money to appreciate. Our regret was that circumstances contrived to keep us from having the time necessary to find a spot and absorb some of it. We’d spent that time on the airport floor, alas.
Our search for food was a painful one. At one point, we found a nice, open doorway into what appeared to be a ritzy place. However, all the servers had disappeared. We waited for several minutes, but no one came back. I stepped further into the place and looked around, but saw no one who looked like an employee. Plenty of customers cramming their pie-holes, but no one to seat us. We gave up and moved on.
Eventually, we found a nice place called the “Iron Cactus.” They had a splendid Mesoamerican décor, a sedate atmosphere and a friendly hostess. We paid attention to none of those features. What we noted was that they could seat us outside and they could do it right now. Good enough for us! The details of the meal are relatively unimportant, save that we split a huge sampler platter of various Mexican dishes, and I generously doused it all with the hottest hot sauce they would give me. A thrill-seeker I am not, and a roller-coaster wimp I am. But among our family and friends, my taste for spice is rivaled by few. The facility served us up a couple of Mexican beers, which I used to wash down my food and the little bits of my tongue flaking away because of the hot sauce. It wuh wurt it!If one can say “you are what you eat,” then Jennifer and I must have eaten a couple of stuffed Thornberries. Out we toddled, feeling heavy, but also freer and more confident. Not to be outdone, San Antonio then reached out and smacked our heads around backward, so we were looking down at our own butt cheeks (“Why didn’t somebody tell me my ass was this big!?”) That must be how we got lost, because neither of us could find any trace of the bus stop where we first exited to the downtown area. Every direction we went, we ended up further lost. Slowly but surely, our time ran out, and we realized that wherever that damn bus stop was, we had long missed the last run back to the hotel. So we found a safe haven on the stoop of an old friendly hotel chain, the Drury Inn. Settling in for a few minutes, Jennifer pulled out her Plan B: a taxi. Yes, she called a central number and requested a ride. Then we waited for the better part of an hour while every taxi but ours went down the road and picked up everyone but us. I was getting highly agitated by this point, figuring my existential guilt that had bent me down and kicked me onto this excursion might have been preferable to the salient anxiety of being trapped away from our only sanctum sanctorum in a very large and unfamiliar city. Adding to our burden, drunken people kept staggering by to stare at us or ask us in slurry words if we knew were various businesses where located. We didn’t, but I found it easiest just to point in the direction that was the opposite of us.
Finally, our cab arrived. Chunking and wheezing, the vehicle had a sickly green light emerging from inside it and wafts of luminous emerald smoke that puffed out of the cracked windshields. Inside, cloistered in the mysterious front seat was a “scabby cabby” who looked like a pile of dirty laundry with a thatch of gray hair awkwardly plopped on top of it. He spoke in a gravely smoker’s voice and flicked his lizard’s tongue while taking down our location. Then he set about finding the longest, most circuitous route by which to drag out the trip and gouge us for more money. While he meandered, he talked, asking us a few questions about ourselves and where we were from. Along the way, he had time to give us a long lecture about the history of Texas and how there are no public parks in the Lone Star State because the money-starved local government sold it all off to private interests. The Hilton bulking on the Texas skyline never looked so inviting by the time we rolled up to the front door. Scabby Cabby handed us a bill for about $22, or eleven times what we paid to go the same distance by bus. We disembarked from the cab and bolted inside, where we soothed over our jangled nerves with a beer from the hotel café.
The rest of the night was mercifully uneventful. But it had been a long day and we were ready for bed.
Sunday, October 14, 2007—Homeward Bound
The return trip wasn’t nearly as eventful as the story of our arrival. The only notable point was that our departure from the San Antonio airport was actually running early. Or rather, there was room on an earlier flight, and we jumped for the chance because our layover in Houston was only about an hour. We’d already missed one flight from that damnable place. We didn’t want another night with the zombies.
All in all, we got home in one piece. The greatest irony was that when we walked out of our arrival gate in our local airport, we saw that the departing flight from there was going to Newark, and it was—you guessed it—delayed! All Jennifer and I could do was shake our heads at those waiting passengers and think to ourselves: “Fellow travelers, you’re in for a lo-o-o-ong adventure.”
And as always, our darlings, thanks for your time and attention to our narrative!
Bonum Fortunam!! [Good fortune!]
Ye Ende
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