Travelogue

Adam here again. Since we are just sitting in the San Antonio (SAT) airport until the flight home boards in an hour and a half, I figured I would put together a most likely sizable blog post that will serve as a travelogue for our trip. Here goes:

Sunday, July 5th: We kind of packed our stuff, but had to wait for the dryer to finish before we could get it all done, and of course began running out of time as the clock approached 10:00 and beyond. We didn't actually get everything packed and ready to go until midnight or so. Which meant the time we set the alarm for (4:30 AM) was horribly close.

Monday, July 6th: We got up, got everything ready to go, and got a very sleepy Joshua up and out to the car to leave at about 6:15. We stopped at Kevin (Lisa's brother) and Brandie's house at about 6:35 and then knocked on the door for a while to wake up the sleeping occupants. They watched Joshua on Monday until Lisa's parents could pick him up that evening for his stay with them for the week while we were to be in SAT.

We rushed up to Lisa's parents' house where we parked the car at just after 7:00 and climbed into Dean and Michelle's van, as they graciously offered to drop us off at the airport. We arrived at the airport in pretty good time and got through security pretty quickly. Maybe too quickly, since our plane wasn't supposed to board until 9:10. So this left us with an hour and a half to sit and do nothing in SeaTac. Oh, well.

The flight to Dallas was long and uneventful, other than Lisa's very painful sinus pressure upon descent. The layover in Dallas was long and uneventful, too. And then we boarded the plane for the one hour hop to SAT. We essentially took off, climbed up to 30,000 feet or so, and then began our descent ten minutes later, which was again very painful for Lisa. Usually she doesn't get that sort of pain when flying, but it was pretty bad this time.

There were a bunch of thunderclouds in the SAT area, and we saw some lightning strikes in the storm bank as it headed westward away from SAT. When we got on the ground and went outside the terminal, we found that the storm had dumped tremendous amounts of rain just a little bit before our flight arrived. So not only was it nearly 100 degrees, it was also 100% humidity. I felt like I was walking into a steam bath when I walked out of the airport doors. Ugh.

We picked up our rental car, which turned out to be a Mazda5. Very nice. I have liked the look of that model for a while, and now we got to test drive one for a week. Excellent. Once in the car, we headed up to the hotel, the Hilton Homewood Suites. It was very nice. Nearly brand new, and just plain nice. I'm really glad my company had us stay there. We got our stuff settled, took a trip to see the new office building, ate dinner at Sonic, and then hit up Wal-Mart for a couple of essentials that we didn't want to try to carry onto the plane. And then it was off to bed, since we were both dead tired from the day.

Tuesday, July 7th: A very early alarm went off, and we got ready for the day. I had to get into work clothes, since I was scheduled to be at the new office building for orientation at 8:30 that morning. Lisa dropped me off and then headed over to our friend Leslie's house to check out some additional rental house listings. My orientation went well, and I am definitely amazed by the size of the new building. Fourteen stories may not sound like a whole lot, but since the biggest building I have ever worked in before was only ten stories with a much smaller footprint, it makes the new Tesoro San Antonio Headquarters feel ginormous. We were taken around the building lobby, our floor, and the conference center where our orientation meeting was to take place.

There was a mix-up with our stuff from my old office, and our boxes had not yet arrived. Also, we didn't have any chairs at our new cubicles. Apparently they thought that we were shipping our old chairs down from Seattle, but we were explicitly instructed to not ship our chairs down. Whatever. They eventually got it straightened out.

After the orientation, Lisa and Leslie picked me up so that we could go and drive around to check out the outside of the rental houses we had been looking at on the Internet. A couple of them looked promising right off the bat, and a couple were immediately dismissed. We drove around a bunch and discovered that the radio station selection in SAT is horrendous. There were at least three stations airing sermons, about 10 Spanish-language stations, three or four Country stations, one oldies/classic rock/disco station, and one modern rock station. ONE. And it played all sorts of different rock ranging from Alternative to Heavy Metal. So no dice. I will obviously be using my iPod a lot. And when I get an iPhone in August, I will be using the Pandora App a whole lot in order to get decent music to listen to.

Anyway, we found a couple of houses that we liked pretty well from the outside, and one in particular that would have been an excellent fit. We headed over to Leslie's house to swim in her pool, have dinner, and hang out with her family, and I called our Realtor to make sure he had scheduled showings of the houses we wanted to see. He hadn't. But he got in gear and scheduled them after I called. And then, around 9:45 PM, I got a call from him saying that the house we liked the best from the outside was just rented that very day, so we were just barely too late for it. Oh, well. We still had another one that we really liked.

Wednesday, July 8th: We were scheduled to meet the Realtor at our new favorite house at 9:00, and we were only a couple of minutes late. There were two houses in the same gated community, and we started at the one that we liked better after walking around the outside and peering into the windows the day before. We walked through and really liked what we saw. A little over 2100 square feet, nice appliances, big bedrooms, and a nice big game room upstairs over the garage. Ding ding. We could have just ended right there and decided on that one, but we wanted to see a couple of other places to make sure that this was the best. We looked at the other house in the gated community, which turned out to have the same floor plan, with a couple of different options. And shiny reddish brown tile all over the bottom floor. No schpanks. We headed to the next place on the list, which was a few minutes closer to my new office, but slightly smaller in size. It turned out to be occupied by a bunch of slacker, loser roommates and reeked of cigarette (and other) smoke, plus the various reptile cages and empty keg of beer. Icky. We were out of there pretty quickly. And then we hit one last other house that seemed pretty nice. It turned out to be occupied by someone very elderly and it smelled like it, too. The floor plan was kind of small compared to our favorite place, and the layout was odd. We crossed that one off, too.

So we ended up choosing the first place after all, and headed over to the rental management office to put in an application. After obtaining a money order with the application fee, we filled out the application and went back to the hotel to hang out and see what they said. They called back a few hours later and let us know that our application had been approved and that we needed to come by the next day to sign lease papers and turn in our security deposit.

Then we drove the rest of the way into downtown SAT to look at the buildings, the Alamo, and the Riverwalk. We didn't stop, since we didn't want to pay for parking or walk around in the 104 degree heat. It was nice to get a feel for the downtown area, but it was also nice to get back on the freeway and head back to the outskirts where we will be spending almost all of our time. At this point, there was nothing else left to do but head up to Leslie's house to hang out again.

But we did more than hang out. Leslie and her husband Dave took us up to this AWESOME hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant called Pappa Gallo's in Bulverde, just north of San Antonio. Oh, my goodness. It was stupendous. We will be taking anyone who comes to visit us up there to that place. Their entrees were excellent, and we had a dessert called "Sizzling Apple Pie" that is to die for. They take a cast iron plate (like they use for sizzling fajitas) and put a slice of delicious apple pie on it. Then they put a big old scoop of ice cream on top of that. Sounds good so far, right? Well, then they pour this amazing caramel syrup on the cast iron plate around the pie, and it immediately starts to bubble and boil and get even more caramelized. It is inadvisable to try to eat any of it at that point, unless you want to sear your taste buds off. So we instead busied ourselves with scooping the syrup up and pouring it over the ice cream, causing it to melt and run down the pie and into the pool of bubbling caramel syrup. Once it cooled a bit, we dug right in. It is the best dessert I have ever eaten, period.

After we were so full that it hurt, we went up the road a bit to check out where Leslie and Dave are building their dream house. It sounds like it will be amazing when it is completed. And we saw roughly 1 billion deer wandering around the property, so they will be able to have fun watching them eat all of their plants, too, when the house is done.

Thursday, July 9th: This was a slightly more lazy morning, since we didn't have to be anywhere first thing in the morning. We went to a credit union branch that would let us access our account at the credit union in Washington to get a cashier's check for the security deposit. Then we went back to the rental management agency's office to sign the lease and give them the deposit. After a bunch of signing and arrangements, we were headed out the door to get everything scheduled for the new house. A call to the power company, then lunch, and then a visit to the Universal City Municipal building later, and everything was scheduled to be hooked up and ready to go for later this month. So it will all be good and ready for us when we get there on August 4th.

At this point, we were all set. Nothing left to do but look around SAT some more and hang out until it was time to head home. So we went back over to Leslie's house, swam in the pool, took naps, and watched some TV. It was very relaxing to be done with the arrangements on the SAT end of the move. We bid them farewell for about a month until we would see them again.

Friday, July 10th: We didn't want to get up early at all today, so we slept in, hit the hotel breakfast just before it closed, and then hung around the hotel room until checkout time at noon. We drove downtown again and parked at Market Square to look for a couple of souvenirs. There are a bunch of little shops, mostly Mexican imports, and we walked around them. It seemed like there was little to no difference between the shops, and we found what we wanted pretty quickly. We looked around for a place to eat, but at this point we were kind of tired of Mexican food, so there weren't a whole lot of options at Market Square or El Mercado. We hopped back into the car and headed up to one of my favorite restaurants in the Midwest, Culver's Custard. They have frozen custard as well as "Butterburgers" and other fast food fare. It was very good, even though it was quite a way out and away from the airport--our final destination.

We finished up at Culver's, and headed in to the Hertz lot to return our trusty Mazda5. I very much like that car. If we are in a position to buy a new car any time soon, I want to get a Mazda5. Anyway, we returned the car, boarded the shuttle bus back to the airport, and then we got to sit around in the terminal enjoying the free WiFi, and trying to block out the painfully bad smooth jazz elevator music that is playing on the PA system.

We will board the plane for our first leg (to Phoenix) on the way home to Seattle in about 10 minutes, so I need to button this post up and publish it. Hope you all enjoyed this novel. We will be home in Seattle soon, but only for a little less than a month before San Antonio becomes home.

There will be plenty of room in our house in SAT for visitors, so we would love for anyone who wants to visit to come on down, y'all. The Fall and Winter here are especially perfect for visitors from colder climates.