As we toured around Austin yesterday, I noticed lots of signs around town proclaiming Austin to be the birthplace of the taco.  I also noticed plenty of places offering breakfast tacos, so I was keen to have myself a true, Austin breakfast taco before leaving town.  We packed up our things early this morning, and headed out, stopping first at Magnolia Cafe just south of where we were browsing the shops yesterday.  My breakfast taco was pretty tasty. I’m glad we took the time to stop before leaving town. It had eggs, mushrooms, and cheddar jack cheese inside a fresh, flour tortilla with homemade salsa served on the side.

After breakfast, we hit the road for San Antonio.  We had pretty low expectations for San Antonio, but I felt that it was our duty to stop since we had to drive right through it anyway.  I wanted to see what was left of the Alamo and experience the famous Riverwalk. We started at the Alamo. The site at the time of the famous battle was considerably larger than what is left now.  Today there is only the old church to go in and a small park beside it. The bulk of the fort was torn down in the intervening years to make room for hotels and cheesy tourist traps, which rather detracted from the solemnity of the battle site.  We did get a requisite photo in front of the iconic church then walked around for a few minutes.

Next, we moved on to the Riverwalk.  Again, we weren’t expecting much. We had read that it was mostly all bars and restaurants along the river.  Since we were there at 9:30 in the morning, none of the restaurants were open and we had the walk nearly all to ourselves.  This gave us a chance to enjoy the waterfowl and pigeons that make the river their home. We also watched a bunch of flat maintenance boats go about maintaining the river area.  One was covered in plants in their nursery containers, ready to be planted in the landscaping along the river. In fact, the landscaper was just a bit further on. The bed he was working on was about half full of little begonias.  We also saw a guy watering the landscaping from his boat. It looked like the boat had a way to suck water directly from the river and shoot it out a hose onto the plants like a fireman putting out a fire. It was after 10:00 as we finished up the main loop, and a few shops were open in the Villita area so we stopped in to look around in those.  All in all, I think we spent about 1.5 hours in San Antonio, and that was plenty for us!

Next stop, Donna, TX.  It was a long, 4.5 hour drive south to reach my parents’ winter home in Donna.  Along the way, the wildflowers in the ditches grew even prettier than they had been north of Austin (we really didn’t see much other than urban sprawl between Austin and San Antonio).  South of San Antonio the blues of the north gave way to oranges, yellows, and purples.

We arrived in Donna just before dinner time.  We’ll be here for the next 3 days.

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