We made a quick trip to San Antonio between Christmas and New Years. The older boy’s marching band was lucky enough to get a slot to play with 13 other high school bands at the Alamo Bowl (they worked extremely hard over the last year to raise enough funds to cover the trip)! So we decided to follow the band down so we could see them play and visit family in San Antonio.
The drive to San Antonio was much longer this time with all of the rain and traffic. The first morning we caught up to the band during a Field Competition and then made our plans for the rest of the stay (most importantly figuring out how and when to get ourselves to the bowl game on Friday night). You can see the Alamodome from the roof of the building where we stayed so we decided we could walk it to avoid traffic. In fact, we walked everywhere on this trip – 8.4 miles on Friday and 6.1 miles on Thursday.
While we were in town we also visited the River Walk, the Mercado, Mi Tierra for some seriously yummy Mexican hot chocolate and did a quick walk by of the Alamo. All of the tourist areas were completely full of red shirted fans (turns out both Iowa and Washington team colors feature red) this trip. It felt a little strange to do a trip with only 3 out of the 4 of us.
The next day to avoid the worst of the crowds we visited the Botanical Gardens and found a pretty amazing exhibit of Lego Art placed throughout the grounds. Some of the pieces had more than 80,000 Lego pieces. We also found some of the concrete art that is famously sprinkled throughout San Antonio (the bench isn’t wood as it appears and is instead crafted out of concrete by an artist and his son) and a Christmas agave. The Christmas agave was my favorite find of this trip so I forced everyone to get pictures taken next to it.
All of that kept us busy until Friday evening and the Alamo Bowl. A friend had snagged us some pretty great seats for the game. And it was easy enough to move around to photograph the field our band took the field in front on 60,000+ fans to perform. They did awesome! It was an amazing experience for them and I was super proud to tell people I was “with the band”.
