We have good friends that live in San Antonio who are kind enough to let us use their home as mailing address for things that we order online from the US.  There are just some things in Mexico that are more expensive or poorer quality and therefore are better to buy. 

We celebrate Labour Day in Mexico on May 1st so it was a good excuse for us to take the bus up to San Antonio to visit Mark & Lily.  The bus ride is 12 hours overnight and it’s really not that bad of a trip.  We arrived in the morning and checked into our hotel, had a quick shower and headed off to check out some of the local sites.  We visited the Alamo, which had really beautiful gardens behind this building.

Mom Trip 007.

I didn’t know the history of the Alamo but to summarize it briefly, this is where a bunch of Texans got their butts kicked by the Mexicans.  I found it strange that they call the Alamo a shrine of liberty and everyone seemed pretty proud of this place.  The famous quote “Remember the Alamo” really translates to “Remember how we got our butts kicked??  Let’s not have this happen again!!” 

We spent the evening at a place called Blue Star Brewing Company where Don and Mark had some beer while I snacked and drank some soda.  On the whole the food was pretty good but I can’t comment on the beer—I’ll leave that for the Guero. 

The next day we took a drive to the San Jose Mission which was much more beautiful and interesting than the Alamo.  It’s the biggest mission in San Antonio and by far the most beautiful.

 Mom Trip 043 

Lots of brides come here to get their wedding photos taken and you can see why.  After touring around the mission, we headed over to our favourite Texas BBQ place, Rudy’s Country Store & BBQ.  The food is really good tasty and they have the best T-Shirts that say “ I didn’t claw my way to the top of the food chain….to eat vegetables!”  Sadly, every time I have tried to get one of these shirts, they either don’t have my size or they are sold out.  It’s not so bad, it just means that I have to keep going back! 

That night, Don hopped on the bus back to SLP while I spent the night at Mark & Lily’s so I could hop on a Southwest Flight back to Canada for a few weeks.  The flight was cheap and it was nice to break up the travel with a visit with our friends, but I wouldn’t recommend trekking back to Canada without the break.  On the whole, we had a lovely visit with Mark & Lily, did lots of shopping and ate very well.  Hopefully we’ll get to visit them again soon.