I'm back home in Louisiana after a week of fun and sun (and a crap load of walking). I've gotten quite a bit of email, some of which will make for excellent blog posts, but give me a few days to catch up. For folks who are really bored and want to hear about the trip...

We began our trip in San Antonio. It's only about 6 hours away so it wasn't a bad drive. In fact, that day we went visit a cave and a drive through zoo. San Antonio is surprisingly beautiful. There is an area they call the river walk which - as you can probably guess, is a river that goes through the city. On both sides though, below street level, you can walk beside the river. It was wonderful. We did Sea World as well, which is cool, but we booked out a bit early when it looked like Dolly was going to dump on us. Turns out all we got was a bit of rain, and even that wasn't so bad.

We left San Antonio for Austin. We visited another cave (what can I say, we like caves) and visited the Columbus Street bridge for the great bat migration. (Every night about 1 million bats who live under the bridge take flight.) Austin was nice - but I absolutely hated the roads. The access roads on both sides of the highway were one way, and we spent one night literally doing about 2-3 loops around our hotel. Very, very frustrating and something I've not seen around a city before.

Oh, and I ate like a wild man. I'm scared to even weigh myself. I can say I had one meal that stood out above all the rest. Pork shanks covered in a chipolte sauce. It was better than you know what. (Ok, maybe not...)

If I learned one lesson - it was to never travel without a bottle opener. I got a six pack in San Antonio that last 3-4 days just because I had to scrounge around for a way to get the darn bottles opened. At the first hotel I actually used the sliding lock doohicky.

Anyway, the most important thing is that the kids had fun, and hopefully they will have fond memories of the trip. They are going crazy now in the house so now it's back to digging through my snail mail.