Jun 042008
 

The band played San Antonio this past Saturday night, so I took the whole family with me for a short vacation. We drove down Saturday morning and had lunch at Mad Hatter’s. The kids got the Kids Tea and The Wife and I got the High Tea, just as we did on our first visit.

After lunch, we headed over to the Witte Museum in Brackenridge Park near the San Antonio Zoo. The Witte is a small natural history and science museum. They have some dinosaur exhibits, a mummy exhibit, some exhibits on Texas wildlife, the HEB Science Treehouse, and some pioneer cabins. The HEB Science Treehouse is very hands-on, much like a children’s museum. We spent roughly two hours there checking everything out. I recommend stopping there if you’ve got school-aged kids. There’s a Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit starting there later this month.

The next stop was the hotel, Hyatt Place, a budget line in the Hyatt hotel chain. It’s a 3-star hotel according to Hotwire, so the accommodations are fairly nice. They’re going for a boutique hotel look. They’ve got nice new 42-inch HD TVs in each room. In general, we were happy with the place, although the pool was closed for construction and there was a nasty wet spot one corner of the room. The gig was at Jiggers, a nearby dive bar. I passed the time before we went on watching MMAs prime time debut on CBS. An old college roommate who recently relocated to SA came to check out the show.

The next morning, we got up and checked out Taco Taco, a taco place that’s gotten kudos from Bon Appetit, Texas Monthly, Food Network and Details. It’s almost literally across the street from Olmo’s Pharmacy, a place we checked out on another trip to San Antonio back in 2004. The breakfast tacos were pretty damn good. The place was packed. We had to wait about 10 minutes to get a table. I had two chilaquiles and one chorizo and egg taco. I’d recommend both. The tortillas were very fresh, something that you find in a lot of places in Austin, but where San Antonio is unmatched.

On the way back to Austin from San Antonio, we stopped at the Snake Farm in New Braunfels. The Boy has decided that he wants to be a herpetologist, so he was in snake heaven. They’ve got quite a large collection of snakes and reptiles and have a small sized petting zoo and other exotic animals out back. The place was featured in an episode of Dirty Jobs this year.

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