Different Trails

SAN ANTONIO (Day 3 - part 5)

Our river boat tour continued...

(right photo) “Coming Home to the Briscoe” by artist T.D. Kelsey was installed in 2015 just outside of the Briscoe Western Art Museum. It depicts a vaquero (Mexican cowboy) driving a herd of longhorn cattle and represents the Southwest in the mid to late-1800s. Apparently longhorns were looked a bit different than today, with shorter horns.

This gothic Tower Life Building (originally the Smith-Young Tower) was erected in 1927. When the stock market crashed shortly thereafter, it began a journey of numerous name changes over the decades.

This is part of the 25-foot deep flood channel, which is the highest that the water level can ever get. This is because the city sits on a slope and this spot is at its lowest point. Any excess water goes off into a tunnel that leads out of the city.

We disembarked and stopped at the nearest restaurant... The Iron Cactus. A spectacular lunch, complete with a margarita and incredible, warmed, smoky salsa!!

Univited guests

We then took a walk out to the Rivercenter mall to review some of the sites we'd just seen.

Some locals

Familiar flower art ... A glimpse of St. Joseph's church

This was us just a short while ago!

St. Anthony again

Back on the main loop, a mariachi band entertains some diners. ... A great-tailed grackle

Returning via Portal San Fernando park

"I put people to work during the hardest times" ... Embedded in the ground were various tools, in memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), where the unemployed were given work here during the Great Depression.

We returned in the evening to catch a light show at the cathedral.. or rather ON the cathedral. Debuting in 2014, The Saga, is a video art projection of images created by Xavier de Richemont. In 24 minutes, the entire history of San Antonio, from the earliest settlements up through present day, is depicted on the 7,000 square foot front facade of the cathedral using color and sound.

We found a spot on the ground and watched as intricate, colored patterns as well as the images of people and things swept across the magnificent building. Most of the images spun, twirled and slid, eventually settling and highlighting the frame of the church. But once an animated animal even ran across a desert scene causing a flock of birds to take flight.

Everything was accompanied by sounds and era-appropriate music. There was a lightning storm with rain, tribal chanting, church choir music, western twangs, a train whistle, Irish and German and Mexican music, jazz and much much more, as we were carried from pre-history, through many wars and celebrations, to current times. Unfortunately my camera battery ran out as the first train trecked across the bottom of the building.

Star of Texas .... A desert critter caught mid-stride amid a rainstorm