Our first Spring Break, 2016. Ethan’s school is closed for a week and with no family in a 1,000 mile radius to circumvent the challenge, the best idea we cooked up a month prior, is for David to take a few days off toward the tail-end of the break and maybe, you know, go somewhere. After a series of half-assed, noncommittal conversations, including an hours-long debate over which hotel to book for one night (a hilarious and often debilitating flaw organically grown out of 15+ years of being together), we had a seemingly concrete plan.
I'm ready, why aren't you?
The Plan
Get up at the crack of dawn Friday (unrealistic expectation #1), make the three-hour drive west to walk through caverns around 9am (when pigs fly), followed by a drive through a wildlife ranch where the animals approach your car for food (speaking of pigs), and conclude the day meeting up with old friends over a great dinner in the Tex Mex capital. Saturday's plan included a short trek north of San Antonio to climb a famous rock before a long drive home.
Translation
Get up at our usual time, have a casual bowl of cereal (or eggs in Heather’s case), meticulously finish packing, and then depart to the gas station to fill up the tires. We hit the road by 9am. The three-hour drive from Houston to San Antonio is mostly flat and typically uneventful, but the Texas sky is epic—especially with an impending storm on the horizon. Factor in a late cavern arrival and possible wet weather, we decided we might as well ditch that plan and create a new mini adventure that included an out-of-the-way detour for what was rumored to be some incredible barbecue in a small town in the middle of Texas—Texas Monthly magazine rated Smitty’s Market one of the top places for barbecue in Central Texas. Because meat.
And it’s true. Smitty’s is the storybook storefront you might imagine in Texas—an old West scene, but with cars and SUVs parked out front. After entering the screen door, we were immediately in a floor-to-ceiling charred hallway full of smokey goodness. We should have been concerned that our 9-month-old was breathing this in… but meat. A couple of strange turns through doorways that may have been leftover from the set of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie and a cafeteria-style dining area, and we were in line for the meat, mere inches from what was surely a 900+ degree stack of burning wood. Thankfully, Ella didn’t have much hair or eyebrows to begin with because they’re likely singed off now.
A half-pound of brisket (lean) and a couple of small links were dropped and wrapped in butcher paper with a half loaf of the requisite white bread that is served in every barbecue joint. Taken into the aforementioned cafeteria room, we grabbed our "fixin’s" (pickles, mac and cheese, iced tea, and lemonade) and took up a corner of a table. There’s nothing glamorous about Smitty’s—it’s a "get in and get to business" establishment. There are no plates, no forks, and a stingy stash of napkins available to patrons. Let us assure you, though: their business is good. Real good. Lately, David lets the weight of the press ruin a perfectly good meal. In this case, he was probably bummed about ordering the lean meat. We aren’t foodies, but we definitely like good food, and this last-minute decision was well worth the detour.
Best to get back in the car quickly before the weight of lunch settles and they recover our corpses strewn across one of the many backroad junkyards or farms, looking not unlike the meat we just consumed. We approached the Natural Bridge Caverns outside of San Antonio an hour later, ignored the line-up of cars to the accompanying wildlife ranch and the police directing traffic on the way in, because of course there will be lines, it is Spring Break after all. These lines though… not even the most prepared family on the planet should torture their kids through these lines. The cavern employees claimed a 45-minute wait to purchase tickets, another hour to begin the tour, which then takes approximately 70 minutes.
To salvage the afternoon with some sort of activity beyond chewing, driving, or standing, we ended up at Friedrich Wilderness Park on the posh north side of San Antonio. It’s a perfect, family-friendly hiking park with well-marked trails at varying degrees of difficulty. Heather and Ella tested out their new ergobaby system and we finally stretched our legs a bit. Again, because we’re city-slickers we forget that, for all its faults and backwardness, parts of Texas are beautiful. This includes San Antonio; the hills, rocks, bluffs with accompanying quarries, and desert-like vegetation are a vast contrast from the urban sprawl of Houston.
And that awesome Tex Mex meal? Total dud. Note to self: for a city renowned for its Tex Mex cuisine, San Antonio also apparently has its share of food that best resembles a TV dinner on a plate. In retrospect, the playground outside should have been the first indication. David’s bad for saying, “something kid-friendly.” Soon after, we ended up at Trader Joe’s for “storm provisions” and hunkered down in the hotel for the rest of the evening.