Since leaving NY, we have become aware that standard weekly weather in the rest of the nation doesn’t include 5 straight days of rain & clouds. Followed by 10 more straight days of rain & clouds. It’s been weird, all this sunshine all the time. Sometimes I find myself half-wishing that we’d get trapped indoors on a rainy day so I would have an excuse to read books and eat crunchy snacks all day. Well, its been raining a lot in Texas. Mostly at night, and mostly in the form of torrential downpour, but its been raining. What I didn’t realize was that when it rains in Texas, it floods in Texas. Flooding is a major fear of mine. I’m not a big fan of water to begin with (I’ve been known to run marathon+ distances without any water, although I don’t think this is really something to brag about), and my family has had some devastating experiences with flooding. We’ve been a little anxious about all this water falling from the sky. Luckily, as I mentioned before, we have been staying at a park with great management who quickly moved us out of water’s way. That did put an end to the fun our little ‘gang’ of RV nomads was having ‘down in the bottom’ of the park, but at least we didn’t float away. A cool thing that happens when it rains in San Antonio, is that everything rapidly turns green. Its pretty sweet to watch.
Its also pretty sweet to watch the people on San Antonio’s River Walk, which we did a lot of, sometimes in the rain. We walked, ran, sat on, biked, boated next to and dined on the Riverwalk. Its a gaudy, colorful, happy place and we loved it there. We celebrated Halloween with a leisurely 30 mile bike ride up and down the Mission trail, stopping in to each of the 5 missions to poke around along the way. I should mention that we fueled our ride with breakfast tamales from the Pearl Market, which was a great choice and a great event. We then followed up our ride with barbecue and beer at The Granary, which was a yet another good choice. We topped the day off by attending the Riverwalk Halloween festivities and watching a costume contest in the rain. And then returning to Dyna to binge eat candy.
San Antonio was celebrating Día de los Muertos while we were in town, which was an extra special treat. Mostly because it involves a kind of creepy premise in an awesomely happy, celebration based atmosphere. Parades, sugar skulls/calaveras, beautiful shrines all over the city, colorful decorations in abundance, extra reason to eat sweets… yep, Day of the Dead celebrations are pretty awesome. We declared that our ‘day of the dead’ would be on Sunday, November 1st, because we’re our own bosses and can do what we want (sometimes). We hit up Market Square (El Mercado) for some face painting, Aguas Frescas, perusing through tchotchkes, and dancing. Then we proceeded to celebrate the Red Rammer’s dead brake pads by finishing the task of changing them. And we celebrated by listening (radio) to the NY Giants (yes, we’re Giants fans) ‘die’ on the field as is more typical than we’d care to admit. (We both also thought about those who had been in our lives physically, but are now of the spirit world; Day of the Dead has a way of making you do some serious things too).
