Ron and myself spent halloween weekend in texas this year, visiting family and attending the Notre Dame vs. WSU football game. It was awesome! We stayed in San Antonio, which is beautiful! It was a nice change of scenery from washington. Ron and I pretty much won the lottery with this trip.. especially me! The main reason we went was the EIGHT FREE tickets we got from family friends of the Pingels, who are Notre Dame alumni, and didn't want to make the trip down just for the game. Ron's cousin Cindy hooked us up with a FREE hotel room at the Fairmont Hotel right in the smack center of downtown San Antonio, and she also provided us a FREE rental car! We ate 3 or 4 bigger meals out, with relatives that generously took care of the bill. I don't think I spent a cent the entire trip, thanks to Ron and his extended family! So we flew into houston early in the morning, and took another flight into San Antonio (which was hot! :) ) where Cindy, Cindy's mom, Cindy's daughter and nephew, all met us in the rental car and they took us to eat at El Tipico (first experience of great texas food), and then to our hotel room at the Fairmont. We settled into our room for a bit until Ron's cousin Adolf (aka Duffy) came and picked us up to go to a small club to watch his sister Jessica (Ron's cousin) perform flamenco! That was so cool to experience, and authentically to! The next day, (saturday, halloween) we spent sight-seeing. We woke up and headed across the street (literally) into Hemisfair Park, where the Tower of the Americas is located, which we proceeded to ride the elevator up and see San Antonio from above. We went across the street to experience the River Walk! This was probably my favorite part of the trip. The River Walk is a long stretch of man made canals that are bordered by restaurants and shops and a mall on one end. Tour boats travel the waters constantly and you hear the guides schpealing their schpeal. This particular day the river walk was flooded with fans in town for the football game, or people out for halloween, so it was crowded, but made people watching too easy!
We then strolled down into La Villita, which is like a farmer's market, but with art galleries and gift shops. My kind of place according to Ron. It was beautiful and I loved all the little shops and "The Little Church" we found. Then we mosied down the street to see the Alamo which is something you have to do when visiting Texas. Ron had never been even though he'd lived in San Antonio, and of course I've never even been inside the Texas state line, so we went and wandered around (no pictures inside though, or hats apparently). Next was the Wax Museum across the street which was mostly interesting but creepy a lot of the time! Some of the figures looked soooooo realistic, which I guess is the point, but especially the figure of Jay Leno (who was standing sort of in the walkway instead of on a platform off to the side) seemed like he would blink and turn to follow you through the museum and it definitely freaked me out! He was one of the ones that only looked more real the closer you got, as opposed to looking more and more fake as you got closer. There was a special section downstairs that was full of monster and alien type figures, supposed to be scary and creepy. We started to walk down the stairs to see if we could handle it, but the creepy guy from Saw, you know, white face, black hair, red targets on his cheeks, yeah that guy was standing next to the entrance and scaring the group ahead of us. Oh yeah, this was a real person dressed up as the character, not a wax person, so he looked at you and approached you.. Well Ron took one look at that guy and said nope! and ran back upstairs.. I wasn't scared until I caught his eye right as I was turning around and started to chase me up the stairs! Needless to say, we did not experience that section of the museum! As a package deal, we also went into the Ripley's Believe it or Not museum of sorts, which was definitely interesting! Lots of wierd things, and things that made you question the authenticity.. but fun! Visiting this location was cut a bit short to get to the football game. We walked over to the Alamo Dome where the game was and realized that everyone was either sporting fan gear, or costumed up for halloween. The game was not a real close one, as Notre Dame is a good team and WSU is not quite as ... competitive. I was still torn on who to support though, seeing that I wanted to cheer on my state, but we were there because of the Fighting Irish.. as a result I pretty much cheered for everything.. The stadium was definitely biased though, Notre Dame fans took over about 90% of the crowd, whereas Coug fans only filled up on little corner. ND did bring their band though and man they were cool! First of all the band itself is huge! Three times the size of the football team. They put on a great half time show, with space missions and texas tunes. The game was fun, and something to check off on the list of things to do in life. We went back to the hotel that night and definitely fell into our nice fluffy beds. Sunday was the family day as we ran around meeting these people and eating here and there. We met family friends of the Pingel's out at a barbeque joint, then went out to Jessica's house, to hang out with her son Zack for a bit before heading to El Tipico again to eat with them and Duffy, Mikey, and Lupy, all before going out to meet Cindy and her daughter to put flowers at some of Ron's relatives grave's and to see the mission where Ron was babitized. We headed back to Cindy's house for the night before fying out early the next morning. Everyone I met was great and friendly and very genrous, and I was very much appriciative of the southern hospitality that was dished out! A huge thank you to all of Ron's family that I met, and an even bigger one to my Ron!! Texas was amazing, and I can't wait until the next visit!
