San Antonio Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone. We hope you are having a blessed holiday. We are spending ours in San Antonio. Here are a few of the things we have seen.

It seems we weren't the only people interested in walking around the Japanese Tea Garden on the Sunday before Christmas. The weather was nice and we even saw a wedding being performed. The garden was built in a former limestone quarry used to mine limestone for Portland cement.

On Christmas Eve we walked on the Riverwalk in downtown San Antonio. Again, that was a popular activity.  Many people were riding these barges on the river.  The barges are like taxis--they allow people to get on and off to stop for shopping or a lunch.  We walked instead.

We checked out LaVillita.  It is a shopping area with many local artisans showing their wares. 

On Christmas Eve we attended Holy Eucharist at St. Mark's Episcopal Church downtown.  The choir and liturgy and sermon we all inspiring.  The church is decorated with candles and red roses.  Beautiful.

More OKC Surprises

We certainly didn't expect a canal and river walk in Oklahoma City, but that is what we found. After we visited the Botanical Gardens we took a walk and discovered this peaceful scene.

There also were boats to take people on tours of the canal and downtown area.

Walking along the path we found a magnolia tree beginning to bloom. We had only seen this once before, when we volunteered at Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas.

We passed water falls.

This is the Chickisaw monument.  Oklahoma was once called Indian Territory because that is where the US government sent a number of tribes of Native Americans when white settlers wanted to move onto reservation land.

Perhaps the biggest surprise was the largest bronze monument we have ever seen--the Oklahoma Land Run monument.  This team or horses doesn't seem to want to cross the water.

Obviously many other horses and wagons have already crossed.

We learned some details about the 1889 Oklahoma Land Run while viewing the monument.  That year the congress and president opened up the unassigned lands within Indian Territory to white settlement.  On April 22 a cannon was fired and would-be settlers who had been stopped at the border of those lands rushed in to choose their own 160 acre plot.  It was bedlam.  To learn more about this piece of history, click here.

Christmas Time on the River Walk

We don't have family or an RV community here in San Antonio to make us feel at home but a walk on the downtown Riverwalk really got us in the holiday mood Friday. We last visited San Antonio in 2003 and we remembered enjoying walking along the river. It is such a pretty setting.

I wasn't the only person taking a picture of this sign outside a restaurant.

Tour boats and river taxis were busy all evening.

We got a kick out of watching this young man being pulled along on his skateboard by his dog. The dog really got a workout.