The last time I was in San Antonio was almost 23 years ago when I was in the midst of Advanced Flight Training held at Randolph Air Force Base, and, at the end of which, I earned my Wings of Gold. As we were fond of saying then, it was six weeks of Navy training crammed into six months of Army Air Force training, SIR!, which left plenty of time to explore the area.  All the military services have good-natured (mostly) rivalry that often points to the subtle differences among them and this cartoon I found online pretty much sums it up.

To distinguish how the Navy and the Air Force operate differently, our class was briefed by one of our Navy instructors on day one at Randolph.  He said something to the effect of “The Air Force tends to provide you a well-indexed, voluminous tome that in great detail defines what you can and cannot do whereas the Navy will toss you a pamphlet listing in bullet format what’s really unacceptable and then gives you the freedom to sort how to best accomplish the task at hand.”  My brief time in Air Force Training Land demonstrated the veracity of that assessment time and time again, which often translated to considerably less pressure while learning the art of long-range navigation by air.  Almost unimaginably, this skill set included learning how to take sextant shots, both day and night, from a moving aircraft to practice celestial navigation, which, sadly, has become a lost art.  After the intensity of Navy Primary Flight School in Pensacola, my whole class of fellow Navy Ensigns was thrilled to throttle back a little and luxuriate in the Air Force way.

With relatively more down time, many of our class stepped out a few times together to check out the Alamo and eat along The Riverwalk, because that’s what you do in San Antonio. Impish at heart, I rather enjoyed rattling some of my classmates, especially those who espoused local history (some almost religiously), by feigning my ignorance of key events that transpired south of the Mason-Dixon Line, “The Alamo?  Wait, wasn’t there, like, a big fight there?  And I think John Wayne was there…”   In response, one of my classmates from the heart of Georgia observed, “Aw, (TACCO), you’re all ate up with the Yank, aintcha?”  Not sure what to make of that, I said, “Um, thank you?” He imperceptibly shook his head, paused before answering and gently said, “Uh.  Naw,” letting me know that his assessment of me had dropped yet another notch by failing to comprehend the depth of the southern insult.

Frankly, more than twenty some odd years later, I’m still not quite sure what that turn of phrase means, but I’m fairly certain it’s not good.

I was adopted by my first dog (a German Shepherd puppy named Lancelot) half way through my training at Randolph, which meant I “stayed in” for most of my later months as most of my free time was consumed by logging countless hours walking Lancelot to ensure I had relatively uninterrupted sleep or chasing him down as he tried to eat my navigation charts.  Lancelot had this weird thing for paper – and eating rocks. But I digress…

While my time in San Antonio wasn’t particularly memorable, aside from getting winged and collecting fodder for future dog shaming posts, I thought it important to share at least The Alamo and The Riverwalk with our kids.  Flight, having been wholly underwhelmed by his few visits to San Antonio during his stint in Corpus Christi for his own Advanced Flight Training, assured me he was just fine missing that particular pilgrimage so we planned for it while he was on a trip.

After a solid Wednesday morning of homeschooling, the kids and I loaded into the car and drove the 90 minutes to San Antonio.  Before we got on our way, I learned that, as the nickname would suggest, the “Mission City” boasts an extensive mission network that has been turned over to the care of the National Park Service.  While I had known what had led to the rallying cry of “Remember the Alamo!” I hadn’t realized that what remains today of the Alamo was originally built as a Spanish stronghold, a presidio, to support further colonization.

When our nation was still just a collection of European colonies, each trying to outpace the others in expansion efforts, the Spanish crown was interested in growing their empire in both population and property and came up with an ingenious plan. Recognizing that these symbiotic efforts were best accomplished together, they first acquired new citizens who would then lay claim to (and pay taxes on!) land that broadened Spain’s boundaries. In order to become a Spanish citizen, there were three main hoops through which the native population had to jump: 1) learn enough Spanish and Latin to effectively communicate and observe Mass; 2) convert to Catholicism, a requisite for Spanish citizenship; and 3) learn a trade to contribute to society at the lowest level of the Spanish caste system.  Before these potential citizens could be so transformed, it was necessary to establish a local military stronghold to protect the crown’s investments.  In 1718, what is now The Alamo was the initial presidio from which the massive conversion campaign was launched through now central Texas, and four other mission sites branched out along the San Antonio River.

We spent most of our time at the San José Mission, which is where the National Park Service has their Visitor Center.

After picking up Junior Ranger books for the girls there, we emerged from the introductory film just in time to join a Ranger-led tour, which was especially noteworthy.  We were led about the compound on an hour-long journey where we were introduced to the initial various inhabitants of the mission and their respective roles therein.

The tour was very well done and I especially appreciated hearing both the European and the native population’s sides on how it all went down in the early 1700s.  The native hunting and gathering tribes throughout what is now Southern Texas and Northeastern Mexico were collectively known as the Coahuiltecans.  These nomadic people had struggled with warring tribes to the north and fell prey to European diseases to which they had no immunity.  The provisions and protection offered by the missions (minus the diseases) and this new way of life may have appeared the lesser of two evils.

The native people were welcomed into these compounds and offered two solid rooms for each extended family, who then took a weekly delivery of beef and corn rations and had access to several shared wells and outdoor ovens, all in exchange for making progress on becoming Spanish subjects.

On the other side of the compound lived the next higher up on the social ladder, Spanish merchants hailing from all over the world.  In addition to learning foreign languages and adopting new religious beliefs, the converts were educated on the arts of agriculture and other crafts practiced in the far-reaching corners of the Spanish Empire. Once these skills were mastered and the new citizens baptized, they were turned outside the protection of the mission walls to fend for themselves in this new way of life (and to free up new rooms for the next family).  It was quite an assembly line the Spanish crown developed to further the Empire.

It goes without saying that the focal point for any mission compound is the church, and this one was simple, but lovely on the inside.

I was captivated by the two-story gallery running the length of the building and was surprised to learn that only three religious leaders were in residence here: a priest and two laypeople.

Just beyond the arch on the far right is a personal garden and well.  Apparently there was sharing of neither wells nor veggies with the commoners. !!!  I guess it was good to be at the top of the social ladder.

After our tour, the girls brought their completed Junior Ranger books into the Visitor Center to receive another badge.

More so than the other two, Firebolt was stoked about the Ranger-let tour and she gushed, “I really liked the tour – the Ranger made it all come alive, it was like I was watching a movie in my head.” And then she tentatively added on, “I think maybe I want to be a Ranger.”  High praise indeed.

From the San José Mission we headed into downtown proper to see The Alamo.  By then the kids were just about historied-out, so it was okay that we arrived only half an hour before The Alamo closed.  We saw the main museum exhibit, moving through it with a purpose lest we get locked in.  More interesting than the folks involved in or the details surrounding the legendary standoff, our kids couldn’t get enough of the enormous koi, making wishes in the fountain, or trying on coonskin hats.

Apparently equally underwhelmed by The Alamo, maybe our kids, too, are all ate up with the Yank?  At least they come by it honestly…

The closing of the Alamo signaled the start of a search for a dinner venue, hopefully located somewhere along the Riverwalk, and we popped into several interesting stores along the way.  Check out the Nacho Libre fans below.

After stopping in a store that must be a cousin to IT’SUGAR where we found scrumptious birthday treats for our cousins, we identified the perfect San Antonio place to eat.

I thought Casa Rio was nothing to write home about, but the kids were thrilled with their dinner choices and gleefully observed, “Mom, they have HORCHATA!” before each ordered some of their favorite beverage.

We dined leisurely, watching tour boats cruise by, all aboard delighted by the unfailing smiles and enthusiastic waves from our girls, and then we meandered along the river to see what we could see.

In the waning sunlight, we retraced our steps to the Subaru.  Our drive back to Austin was uneventful and the perfect ending to seeing the best of San Antonio in six hours or less, making for a healthy amble down memory lane.  Not bad for a gaggle of Yanks…

Departing Phoenix we tried a new version of the dawn patrol, which worked quite well.  Essentially we front-loaded all the work the night before so that Go Time mostly just consisted of waking to my alarm, making a cup of coffee (and taking a quick shower) to get me coherent, and rolling into the pre-dawn.  We had covered quite a bit of ground before things reached their normal activity level in Davista.

While eastern Arizona was quite beautiful, particularly the parts that traversed the mountains, southern New Mexico was less so.  I kept searching for something to find interesting, but didn’t have much success until Las Cruces, where the Rio Grande valley greens things up a bit and a sharp ridge of mountains behind it teases at some more intriguing surroundings.  But alas, the Rio Grande was where we turned south toward El Paso, so we never quite reached those mountains.

I’ve been to northern New Mexico in the higher elevations and loved it, so this stretch of road did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for our planned return to the state’s mountains later this Spring.

Bypassing El Paso to the north, we joined a two-lane road that led us through barren desert toward Guadalupe Mountains National Park, still in Texas but just, and our jump-off point to Carlsbad Caverns.  I had initially reserved another campsite in New Mexico from which to drive to and explore the caverns, but the more I looked at it, the higher the sketchiness factor appeared.  Comments from the “reviews” section of a website I use to scout campgrounds contained phrases like “not too much trash” and “just far enough from the road so they can’t see you” as well as the somewhat more ominous “felt a little off…”  Nahhhhh.  Out here I would’ve been happy to do a Wal-Mart parking lot, but there were neither Wal-Marts nor parking lots, so expanding our search into TX and finding a national park I’d previously never heard of with a campground that took RVs was a no-brainer, even if it was first-come-first-served.

I just mentioned that I had never heard of Guadalupe Mountains National Park, right?  Yeah, it’s tiny.  Basically a nubbin of a short mountain range in southern New Mexico (the same one in which Carlsbad Caverns is found) pokes into Texas at its southern end, and in doing so creates the highest point in the state at 8,749’.  There’s a small visitors’ center and a campground, which was really just a three-row parking lot with a bathroom, at least the RV side of it.  The tent side looked a little more scenic, but was equally diminutive.  The sole trailhead sat 20 feet from our parking spot campsite, and from there it appeared that you could do some solid hiking.  I will give it that.  Yet… Tacco and I found ourselves speculating on what sort of horse trading might have been involved in the establishment of this place as a national park.  Maybe we’d have felt differently had we done some of the hikes, or if we were from Texas and felt like we deserved to have at least a couple national parks since Utah and California get to have so many.  Kidding!  Mostly…

Regardless of its relative modesty, it was reasonably pleasant and safe, the girls knocked out another Junior Ranger program, and Keeper, who has of late developed an interest in cooking shows, fixed us an outstanding dinner.  A friend of mine once told me she loved guys from Louisiana because “they call you ‘darling’ and they’re all great cooks.”  Keeper will almost certainly never be from Louisiana, and doesn’t have the chops yet to call anyone “darling” (which will probably suit him well even when he does have the chops), but he’s way ahead of the curve on the cooking part!

The next day was our Carlsbad Caverns day, and was something I had been quietly looking forward to.  The idea of a no kidding cavern with crazy limestone formations and underground pools and stalactites and stalagmites all up in your face is something I have always been fascinated by, yet so far I have managed never to see one in person.

The caverns have a natural opening of course, out of which tens of thousands of bats swarm each dusk on their search for insect meals.  We weren’t there at the right time to see them unfortunately, but learning this factoid answered my “how did they find this cavern in the middle of nowhere?” question.

Most visitors, however, descend into the 800’ deep caverns via elevator from the visitors’ center, which seemed like a cop out to me.  I was actually pleased to discover that the elevators were out of service during our visit, taking this option off the table.

Beginning a hike with a steep descent, negotiated via switchbacks, was a first for me as well (clearly I’ve never hiked the Grand Canyon either).  I was surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, at how quickly the light was gone and replaced by the extensive artificial lighting network the park service had installed.  It was only a hundred or two feet down where we read that at this depth, without the artificial light there’s nothing for your eyes to even adjust to.  Just pure black.

Noteworthy also was the condition of what appeared to be a vast majority of the visitors climbing back out of the cavern.  Bulging eyes, stopping every hundred feet or so to gasp for breath, pale and sweat-covered… I have to admit it made me wonder whether 800 feet was a much greater vertical distance than I was remembering it to be, or whether cave air robs you of your oxygen or maybe just your mojo in some mysterious way.  Not that any of these people appeared to be endurance athletes, in fact far from it in most cases, but their apparent exhaustion certainly seemed excessive.  Was this a more taxing hike than it appeared?  Would I be carrying out the kids on my back?  I filed these thoughts away for later.

The sheer size and labyrinthine nature of the complex of caverns overwhelmed me as we continued to descend.  I absolutely can not imagine exploring something like this armed with only a headlamp and a rope.  Yes, I understand that they have a system for ensuring they don’t get lost, but that would not be remotely enough for me.  It’s easy to forget, when you’re wandering around gawking at everything, that this place is now lit up by thousands of lights (and it’s still only very dimly lit) and that you’re walking on paved trails with handrails.  Safety rope or not, it would be terribly disorienting, and with a constant nagging fear (for me at least) of some sort of malfunction causing me to be enveloped by darkness and hopelessly lost.  Evidently I am not a closet spelunker.

All that said, the caverns were stunning.

We traversed the entire loop trail and stopped near the “rock of ages” to complete Junior Ranger activities.

Prior to our own ascent I recalled the sight of the sweaty zombies emerging during our descent and decided to attempt to get ahead of the kids’ inevitable complaints about the climb.  My exhortations about their hiking skills and the fact that they had easily conquered several more difficult hikes may have had some effect, but I think it was my turning it into a “who can complain the least” game that truly pushed them over the edge.  Gamification wins!  They killed it.  As it turned out, 800 vertical feet is just about what I remembered 800 vertical feet to be, and wasn’t particularly tricky.  Keeper and Firebolt blazed the trail and reached the top a solid five minutes before the rest of us, with Keeper declaring that he felt like returning to the bottom and coming back up again, just because.  Even Woodsprite managed not to complain, and we hardly broke a sweat.  I was proud of my family.  I did, however, find myself musing, at about the 2/3-to-the-top point, on the general physical condition of the average American.

After a bit of messing around back in the visitor’s center, we made our way back to Davista at Guadalupe Mountains NP and set up for another dawn patrol after an early night.  It would be another long drive through Texas to Austin in the morning, and despite our short stay in the area, we felt confident we had seen everything we ought to have.  My post title was a touch snarky, but in truth I’m glad we made this visit and got to dip our toes into this region of the country.  It’s entirely unique and fits well into the whole, even if it contains very little that screams “look at me!!”  It helped us all, I think, to understand a bit better how vast the landscape is once you get outside the cities.

OK that’s not ALL we did in Phoenix.  Far from it.  No, really.

We’ve learned how much we appreciate variety while on the road.  A little bit of primitive “dry” camping, some cushy private RV “resorts,” a generous smattering of wooded state parks with a ton of space, the very occasional beach cottage…  We haven’t been traveling long enough this go-around to really need what we got in Phoenix, but it was most certainly appreciated.  In fact, I would classify the week as “epic.”

My best friend from college with whom I commiserated on day 1 of Naval ROTC training back in 1986 is now an Emergency Room physician in Phoenix.  He lives on what I can only call a “compound” (in the very best sense of the word) in the middle of a fairly dense but entirely pleasant residential area with his lovely wife and four kids, whose ages match my kids’ perfectly.  We don’t communicate nearly enough and see each other even less, so a visit to Phoenix was a must, and when he suggested that we take over a corner of his 1.5 acre lot cousin Eddie style, I jumped at the opportunity.  This visit would entail a work trip out of PHX, so it would be a relatively long stay.

Regarding the wine… I can’t really call him a wine enthusiast or aficionado, as neither of those words convey the level of commitment.  At the same time, “freak” goes too far.  Essentially he’s the best kind of wine geek – he’s been a well-educated fan since college and has aggressively collected and studied wine as a hobby since then, with his cellar size more or less tracking with his means.  For years it’s been so large that he needs to store it off-site.  But he’s not ostentatious or pretentious about it – he likes to drink it and enjoy it with friends, not display it and save it.  And yet he’s not really a “drinker,” so a very basic calculus problem will demonstrate the degree to which his cellar growth has vastly outpaced his rate of consumption.  At some point he played that math forward and realized he needed to slow down his rate of purchase and find more occasions to pull out the really good stuff.

This, lucky for us, was one of those occasions.

We drank well.  Oh man did we drink well.  But even more fortuitous was my being in town during one of his annual “wine dinners” with a few like-minded friends of his.  It’s a ridiculously exclusive thing where they pull out all the stops for a night, have a catered dinner, and taste 6-7 wines centered on a theme.  This year’s theme was Andy Beckstoffer grapes, which I knew nothing about previously but rapidly got up to speed on.  It was by no means a given that I would be able to attend this dinner, but he was able to grease the skids for my attendance.  I’m convinced this was a once in a lifetime kind of thing for me.

But I’ll stop there with the wine geekery and put the details in another post for the curious.

The overarching theme here is that the visit was a smashing success and fed the soul.  Our kids got along famously and will likely continue to keep in touch.  The weather was perfect.  The adults, with several nights lounging by the pool while the kids played, had enough time to catch up and reconnect in earnest.  So often time constraints rush that sort of get-together; not so this time.  Even with school, work, and the typical life stuff we all manage, we were able to cook together, eat together, watch our kids play together, and do just the right amount of reminiscing.

Every morning I would get up and wander over to their enormous grapefruit tree to pick a few for breakfast – incidentally that’s the best way to make your kids grapefruit fans.

Keeper and I pulled out our drones and took advantage of their enormous yard to practice flying them around and scaring their dog.  OK, that part wasn’t on purpose, but was an amusing discovery, after which we steered the drone clear of him.  He really didn’t like that thing.

One day gave us the opportunity to head north (and up) to Sedona.  On another we met up with some old Whidbey Island friends at the Musical Instrument Museum.

Sedona was stunning, but felt a little commercial to me.  Back in Washington there are a few mountain towns that took an emerging theme and decided to go whole hog with it as sort of a marketing ploy.  Successful marketing by the way — they’re fun towns and get a ton of visitors.  But still, there’s a veneer of inauthenticity to it that you have to either ignore or decide it’s part of the fun and roll with.  Sedona, to me at least, felt like “hey, come visit the New Age theme town!”  I don’t know how deliberate that was on the town’s part and it may be an unfair characterization, but that was my take.  The crowds and horrible traffic (on a Monday!) didn’t help.  And it certainly doesn’t need the marketing – the scenery is spectacular and stands on its own.  I’m told there is also a very real energetic feel to the place that undergirds its reputation.  Both Tacco and one of my friends’ kids mentioned sensing it.  I didn’t, but I did appreciate the red rocks and jaw-dropping vistas.

We took a short hike along a stream that runs through town and stacked rocks within an “energy vortex.”  Vortex?  Maybe not — it might have been an energy perturbation or a confluence.  The ranger at the park entrance even mentioned it when we paid our entrance fee.  But I forget how he billed it.  It looked cool though.

It would’ve been nice to take a dip or at least wade there, but the weather was actually quite chilly despite the sun.  It sits at about 4500’, so even in the summer it can be crisp.

We drove (crawled?) through town thereafter, on the way to Slide Rock State Park.  It’s billed as a refreshing antidote to the summer heat – which, as a mountain stream cascading over some slippery red rocks, it would be.  It’s less of an antidote to a bracing March afternoon, particularly when you arrive there after the sun dips behind the canyon walls.  The kiddos were nothing if not game, though, and Keeper made waves as it were by being the only one there to go full immersion in the chilly water.  That’s my Pacific Northwest boy!

He tried to do some sliding in order to get others to join him, but the rocks turned out to be not especially slippery.  I guess Sit On Your Butt And Push Yourself Over The Rock State Park is a less catchy name.

On the way back down the hill we split off from the others and enjoyed an excellent dinner with Tacco’s aunt and uncle, whom she hadn’t seen in years and was looking forward to catching up with.  Loving these Target Of Opportunity visits — huge benefit to this lifestyle.

Easter Sunday was another highlight.  A sizable chunk of their extended family calls Phoenix home, and Easter is a traditional get-together time for them, so we were able to take part in a perfectly chaotic Easter Egg hunt for the kids as well as a sunny, lounge-y, nibble all afternoon sort of day.

We had planned to depart on Monday after Easter, but we all agreed that one more day just hanging out with nothing at all to do (they weren’t working and their kids started Spring Break) would be a far better use of our time than trekking east to City of Rocks State Park in New Mexico.  So we stayed another day and chopped City of Rocks off the list, rationalizing that if we did a dawn patrol departure on Tuesday we could easily make it to Carlsbad Caverns.  So glad we made that call.  More swimming, more running around the yard (the kids, mostly), some insanely good pizza, and yes, some more wine.  Perfect.

We said our goodbyes in the evening and pre-positioned Davista+Toad for our planned 4:30AM departure.  My intent was to get up, make a cup of coffee and shower to wake up, open their gate, and roll with everyone still asleep.  Prior to the goodbyes, though, I decided it would be a good idea to fly the drone one more time.  Why on Earth would you do that, you ask?  Exactly.  It seemed really smart at the time though, and yes, there was wine involved.  I flew it straight up to clear all the palm trees and also to show off a little bit, and it almost immediately caught some upper level winds and took off to the north.  Not being GPS stabilized like the more expensive drones, it’s both very susceptible to such things and tricky to orient so as to get it flying back toward you.  More so once it starts tearing away and the tiny lights are all you can see of it.  Had I been able to orient it perfectly back toward us and get it back down out of the higher winds I might have had the chance to show them what an amazing pilot I am.  “I’m going to be impressed if you’re able to recover that” was the last thing I heard (along with the beeping of my controller, informing me that its commands were no longer reaching the drone) before I watched it disappear behind some distant trees.  I felt like I was in high school again as he and I tooled around the neighborhood in the dark, scanning the trees and walking quietly up to people’s backyard walls and peering over them, hoping to catch sight of my wayward drone and wondering what I’d say if the lights in the house suddenly came on and the resident asked what an almost-50-year-old man with a baseball cap on was doing climbing their wall.  It was fun.  Didn’t find the drone though.

[P.S. She found it the day after we left and shipped it to one of our future stops.  Awesome.  Evidently it went far further than he and I had been looking!]

Overall we hated to leave, but appreciated having such an opportunity.  The kids made new friends and got some solid play-with-kids-our-age time and we got to have the kind of week with friends that you really only get a few times per lifetime I think.  It strikes me in retrospect that that’s a large part of why we wanted to do this trip in the first place.