San Antonio

The road slowly became more congested as we got closer to San Antonio, home of the Alamo, which has about 1.5mil population, so only slightly larger than Calgary but wow, did they build this city properly to handle the traffic. The infrastructure is amazingly simple to navigate but very complicated in design. This allows for very efficient people movement from what we experienced. Once we got settled into a hotel we headed to the downtown area as they have a river-walk system of trails along the San Antonio River that winds its’ way through the city.

This was absolutely amazing, the architects did an amazing job of integrating the river into the landscape of the city by lining the banks with walkways, restaurants, bars, small parks, and stairway access to the surface streets in order to maximize the use for pedestrian traffic in the city core. There are also water taxis that offer guided tours up and down the river that for the most part looks like a Venice canal as opposed to river.
San Antonio in the morning can be summed up in one word, cold. 1C to be precise. We took our time packing up in order to allow the sun to get any frost off the roads before we headed out. We headed out on Rte. 16 through the burbs and surrounding ranch land in the rolling hills. This area reminds us of southern Alberta, funny how the more we see the more things seem the same. It is also nice to see other bikers out for a Sunday ride. The town of Barona is this areas’ version of Bragg Creek where all the weekend warriors ride to with their shiny bikes and spotless leathers, then ride the nice country roads before heading back into the city. Once again, same same only different. The secondary highways only lasted about an hour before we merged onto interstate10. We usually don’t ride interstates as they are boring, unfortunately the secondary routes run mostly North and South. Best part of the day was seeing a stealth bomber parked at the San Antonio AFB and of course when the temperature reached 28C.

The Alamo.


The view from the Tower.