Sunday, April 01, 2007

San Antonio


Per Johnny's recommendation, I decided not to blog about our recent trip to San Antonio until we returned. I hinted several times on the blog that we were headed to Texas, but never said when we were going to be gone. Not that I believe any of the few readers I have were going to rob our house.

B and I had a wonderful week in San Antonio at the 2007 SITE conference. Instead of comprehensive exams, my university requires doc students to complete a Residency Portfolio. The RP is a capstone experience that each student must complete prior to acceptance to candidacy. I am pretty far into the process. I have developed an online course, taught said course for the last 2 semesters, and presented at our bi-annual student seminar. With this conference, I added 2 more artifacts to my RP - a published paper and a presentation at an international conference. My presentation was part of an 8 person symposia about the RP process and multimedia integration. My piece was about the mentoring relationship during the development of my course. It went off without a hitch, and I was especially flattered because one person (who wasn't B) came just to hear me speak! How cool is that?

On to the trip...


Weather: San Antonio is beautiful, clean and breezy. When the weather was good, it was great. However it managed to rain all day on Monday, and spit in fits on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Wednesday was perfect.


Flight: No big deal. The flights down were cramped and we were seated in the very back of a small plane across from the toilets. Nice. The return flights were just as cramped, but we were farther up the plane. Lots of turbulence from the storms, but otherwise okay. Dramamine is my friend.


Food: Everyone I've met who's gone to San Antonio says that the food is wonderful. To me, it was okay. We had good meals and bad meals.

~On Sunday and Tuesday we ended up at this place, it wasn't on purpose, it just happened that way. The best things were the margaritas and the chicken flautas.

~On Wednesday we went out with our group to this place, and I had my best meal in San Antonio - penne with chicken, spicy chilies and tomato cream sauce. Dang, it was awesome.

Wednesday we ate at this crap place because we were stuck in the Riverwalk Mall and later had junk food at the Spurs game. Wednesday was a bad food day all around.

~Thursday those of us left at the conference had our last supper at this place. Meh. Not my favorite. You can swing a cat in our state and hit a steakhouse. This was my worst meal.

~Breakfast was in the hotel. I loved the chef; he made me tomato and cheese omelets every day. It didn't hurt that he was really cute and had sexy tattoos on both forearms.

~I also discovered these, and I am sad, sad, sad because they are not offered in my state. Actually, it's probably a good thing. If I ate these all of the time, I would have cankles and probably weigh 4000 lbs.


Fun:The Riverwalk that winds through the city is beautiful and relaxing. We walked our legs off every day.

~Before we took our car back on Monday, we went to the Quarry Market and shopped, but it was like any other mall.

~Wednesday was perfect, and was Big Fun Day. We shopped at the Riverwalk mall on Wednesday, and I ended up bringing home many T-shirts and lots of this stuff, which smells like a dream. After shopping we went to the Alamo and then took a River Taxi back to our hotel. Later the entire group of us went to the San Antonio/New Orleans NBA game and were so far up in the arena I got vertigo! Check out the pics if you don't believe me!

4 comments:

Mamacita said...

Sounds like fun....I've been there once, but it was a long time ago.

aimeeg said...

Sounds like a good trip. We've been to most of the states, but never Texas.

walternatives said...

Delighted to hear that the conference was such a success. Can I offer a where to eat website that might have been helpful? www dot chowhound dot com. We used it to find a great Mexican restaurant (in our own city) this past weekend. Chain restaurants, I think, generally suck.

wzgirl said...

Never been to San Antone. Looks like fun! Congrats on the presentation - you look so distinguished standing by the title of your work!! You go.