San Antonio

Coach - minimum $79 per purse. Average? Probably about $200 US.

The Land of Consumerism

We arrived at the outlet mall in San Antonio, and were just completely blown away. Wow. People have a lot of money and time to spend at these ridiculous places!!! There were two giant outlet malls put together as one - it was like a whole city. The other thing that got me was the large variety and differentiation of products. For example, while we were buying Reese's Pieces at this dinky littleWe really haven't been "away" from the US/Canada for very long, but when we went to the gas shop, I counted 9, yes, NINE, different forms of Reese's Pieces - whether it was packaging, flavour, or size. Crazy! Why do we need this??

Part of the giant outlet mall!

Nevertheless, we had a wonderful time in San Antonio. Putting all guilt aside, we shopped to our little hearts' content, walked around the Riverwalk, toured through the Alamo, and just fell in love with this city.

The Emily Morgan Hotel - we pricelined and got a great
price for this historic fancy hotel right beside the Alamo.

The Riverwalk at night.

Remember the Alamo? Nope. Not really, but now I do. The story of the Alamo was tragic and depressing. We watched a video about the fall of the Alamo. For all you Canadians, I will recap the story cause I found it really interesting. Texas once belonged to Mexico, but there were a lot of immigrants who moved to the state. They were promised citizenship, but it never came through. This was partly the reason they started to rebel. A brother of a Mexican general came up to San Antonio and was killed by these immigrants, so the Mexican general began a march up to teach them a lesson. The immigrants gathered as many forces as they could, and used the Alamo, which was once a Spanish mission, as their fort. On the week of the big fight, one of the two captains came down with pneumonia and was out of commission for fighting. The other captain, who was only in his 20s, started to write letters to people all around the country pleading for help. One group started to come, but their wagons broke along the way so they returned. Only one other small group came to their aid, because the USA was too busy drawing up documents or something to do with constitution-like things. Altogether, the fighters of Alamo totaled 200. The Mexian army had about 3000 people! All of them were killed fighting for Texan independence. This was the start of the revolution which eventually helped Texas leave Mexico, which is why people "remember the Alamo."

The Alamo at night.

The gate to the Alamo.

The main entrance to the Alamo.