Missions Accomplished

The plan for today was to visit the Alamo and have a quiet afternoon back at the campground. You probably figured out that we did a bit more than planned.

We started by visiting the Alamo in downtown San Antonio. The Alamo has tours on the half hour and we thought we would make the 10AM tour. We would have made it, except the parking lot next to the Alamo was charging $35 for two hours. In San Antonio! The lot right next door was charging just $5 per hour. So we switched lots. That cost us enough time that we missed the first tour, a small price to pay for the huge savings! After all, we're retirees on a fixed income...

Our Alamo tour guide was a history PhD student who is an enthusiastic teacher. She wasn’t born in Texas, but had previously lived in San Antonio with the military. We got an in depth history of the mission and the famous battle that started the Texas revolution. There were statues of David Crockett and James Bowie and others who died at the battle.

After the tour, we checked out some other exhibits at the Alamo. There is a huge construction site going on for a new visitor center. They had a shooting demonstration using old fashioned musket guns. They had a virtual exhibit in the Long Barracks, which may be the oldest building in Texas. For the virtual exhibit, they gave you an iPad-like device that gave a virtual reality view on what the area would have looked like at different points of time. This gimmick was just "meh".

Once we finished with the Alamo, we decided to check out a few of the other missions in San Antonio. They are a World Heritage Site run by the National Parks Service. We stopped by the Ranger Station and learned that we have seen about 2/3 of the US World Heritage Sites, including Carlsbad Caverns!

Unlike in California, where the missions are separated by one day's travel by horse, the missions near San Antonio are just 2-3 miles apart. We tried to learn why, but we didn’t get a clear answer. It looks like the missions were built near the San Antonio River in different farming communities. The missions in San Antonio are more interesting to visit than the ones in California. At the California missions, the surrounding land has been sold and developed, so only the church remains. In San Antonio, they preserved the courtyard area, so you can see how the community lived. And in some cases, they preserved the farms and irrigation systems in San Antonio.

We visited four of the five missions in San Antonio, including the Alamo. The church at the Alamo was never completed. In fact, the familiar bell-shaped facade was added years later. But the other missions are still being used as churches today, even though the land is in the National Park system.