Post from Saturday, January 18th, 2014

Well ever since I started culinary school my eyes have been wide open.  My family and I decided on the spur of the moment on a mini vacay to San Antonio over the weekend.  It was event filled, a total blast!  We took the riverboat cruise down the San Antonio River at the Riverwalk, stayed at the Drury Inn Hotel and Suites where we had discount coupons from the free hotel coupon.com magazine at One of the Denny's in Houston, toured the Alamo, went on a real-live ghost haunt in downtown San Antonio where 800+ people fighting at the Alamo lost their lives in just about 90 seconds.  There were plenty of other tragic things that happened there.  Lo' and behold I did catch a lot of it on my iPad Air.  Although I don't believe you need one just to catch a ghost on camera, I have a special attachment to mine.

Let me tell you about the Drury Inn, it was very very comfortable though one of the outlets didn't work which is why the lamp on my side of the bed wasn't working.  The hotel had an impressive room service menu with impressive prices, in a good way!  They served free breakfast which had many tasty choices and offered foods for the health conscious.  They also offered what they call a 5:30 Kickback.  It was dinner, it wasn't something you'd get at Applebee's which was adjacent to the hotel, or anything offering a full family menu.  If you didn't like chili dogs or beans then you were pretty much out of luck save for small baked potatoes and a salad.  Seriously though, they could have saved them small drawed up things and made small French fries, they probably would have been better received.  But beggars can't be choosers or can they?i mean the meal was free, and on top of that they served a free bar.  I ordered a tequila sunrise, let me tell you I tasted no sunrise in my tequila sunrise.  They was so much alcohol the room began to spin on my first couple of sips.  I left nearly a whole glass un-consumed.  Yeah, I could have asked them to water it down for me some or fix me another with much less tequila and much more sunrise but I was at the end of my dinner and we were headed upstairs to take a nap before we became legitimate ghost haunts in a couple hours.

So on our last day there we went to the Snake Farm And Wild Animal Zoo.  I had always seen this place of the side of the road whe. I lived in San Antonio a few years back.  I never checked it out, just scared.  Much like my approach to the Culinary School I attend.  My first impression was much better than that of the ginormous San Antonio Zoo, you had look for the tired animals who hid ore than showed themselves.  Here, you are first greeted by anacondas, pythons and all kinds of snakes, and other reptiles.  They sell you a small bag of feed for a small price to feed the animals if you want (no not the snakes!), once you get outside where theist of the animals don't slither you are greeted by happy turkeys, peacocks, roosters just casually walking around.  They walk up to you.  Give these happy creatures a little bit of feed and you've got. Friend for the rest of your life or however long your stay there is, whatever comes first.  We couldn't find the camels at the SN Antonio Zoo but here she was there, beautiful and interacted with us.  All of the animals did.  They even have real live animal demonstrations done by the animal handlers or guest ones who come there to inform, educate and entertain.  The demonstration was the white lion cubs.  Solo cute, they were 9 months old.  They were interactive too and the guests were able to interact back by petting them and taking up-close photo shots on their various electronic cellular devices.  Or you can feed the billy goats and the camels.  I got to see my favorite, up-close.  I have only ever been able to see my favorite animal via photos, on television, in magazines, etc.  I saw the wolves!  I love wolves, they are so hauntingly beautiful.  They as I say are not of this world, it just seems like they have been here before.  Like they we motivated by spiritual forces.  We saw eagles, monkeys, etc.  this snake farm is not just a snake farm, nope!  It is so much more!  Including a Perty neat gift, souveineir shop.  I know I totally mutilated that word.
Our next and last stop was ZDTs in somewhere.  Lol!  Nah it's in Seguin, TX.  OMG! This big attraction in the little town of Seguin was so much fun.  A 2-story Go Cart Track, amusement park rides one of which I went on and ended my day.  My stomach was feeling some kinda way and headed back to Houston.  But they had old water or chemical vats that they turned into climbing walls, 2 arcades.  Some games featured old Atari faves like Donkey Kong and Centipede, there were some racing games and then if that isn't enough for you the. You bounce on probably the biggest rubber band in the world that's made for both kids and adults.

One restaurant we visited that I'd like to name was suggested by my finances son, 'Dick's Last Resort', he had warned us that the purpose was to give us bad service, intentionally.  I forgot that when we walked through the door.  How does a waitress, waiters walk right past us, seeing us come in, and hold casual conversations about the weather and river walk tourists.  I was like, "didn't they see us standing here!"  Finally some saw us instead of looking through us like we were made of glass.  We were taken to our seats, our silverware thrown down on the table, our napkins floating aimlessly in the air after being tossed at us.  Our waitress asked us if we knew anything about the restaurant, I told her the we heard some things.  She was like alright, let me explain this to you!  Then the fun began!  People actually come here for bad service.  I mean this has to be the dream job for rude people, seriously, I'm. to rude but when a bad attitude is not only expected but encouraged is so much fun!  I mean they are not like Beeyatch! There is a tad bit of decorum here.  The. They don these ridiculous towering paper hats on your head upon which they've written something not so kind on them.  It's all part of the Mbience, so this is NOT the place to go if you have no sense of humor.  If you can't take a joke then I advise you go to the British bar a couple steps up the sidewalk.  The bathroom was very clean, the faucet handles were in my opinion a little unsanitary functionally.  I mean, I went to turn the handle, nothing.  I had to turn the loose handle like five turns as it swiveled freely around to ge some water to wash my hands.  I though it was funny, but can make a real germiphobe real uncomfortable.

I cNt end this without telling you about the food, their cheeseburgers are huge, juicy, delectable and don't order the double like I did (ginormous) and then go on an amusement ride 2 or 3 hours later at ZDTs like I did.  They have Shri so in a bucket, really it wouldn't order this.  If I had ordered this like some other people did I would have been like, "ok, really?  Jokes over, no more playing!"  The bucket is true but the shrimp is pitiful.  They place a cloth dinner napkin across the opening of the bucket and place 4 pitiful looking shrimp on top of it.  Literally!  That's the dish,  if he hadn't ordered the chili cheese fries he would have been out of luck, even that was small.  My double cheeseburger could have ate everyone else's dish for a snake except for maybe my son who had a single cheeseburger.

Well that was our weekend!