Barry and Kathii

We had the pleasure of staying for three nights at my uncle & aunt Barry & Kathii's place in San Antonio. Barry and Kathii are very much into koi and have a splendid koi pond in their backyard...



...and very comfortable hanging chairs:



Maomao enjoyed the garden quite a bit, as did a bevy of stray cats, including this one:



Maomao was incidentally quite terrified of the koi.

The first night we strolled along the River Walk and had dinner at a Mexican restaurant on the river. On Sunday, we went for a drive in the hill country north of San Antonio. We had lunch at the Gristmill in Gruene (pronounced "green"), near the site of the oldest dance hall in Texas ("Gruene Hall"):



While at the Gristmill, Gina noticed young people floating down the Guadelupe River on inner tubes (called "toobs") and thought there could be nothing more fun in the whole world. Apparently, when she was a kid, some of her more lucky friends had access to old tires and could float down the river in Pengfang, while Gina (with no tire of her own) could only look on with envy.

Thus, the next day, just the two of us drove back to Gruene and got two toobs from Rockin R River rides. We were taken in a bus four miles up river and floated back down to Gruene. The local college students generally partake of this activity under the hot afternoon sun, with coolers of beer floating beside them on special inner tubes. We did it in the morning and were actually kind of cold at first, until the sun got higher into the sky. I thought it was quite fun, especially floating down a few small rapids. At the very end, however, just as we were nearing the beach where we would pull ourselves out of the water, Gina was struck with misfortune. She crashed into a rock in the last set of rapids, lost one of her shoes (a pair of crocs borrowed from Kathii specifically for the purposes of wearing in the river) as well as her inner tube (which I recovered a ways downriver) and ended up stuck on a rock in the middle of the rapids. After about a half hour, somebody from the Rockin R River shop explained to me that she should just float without an inner tube through the last set of rapids and then swim to shore, which is what she ended up doing. Here is a satellite image of the Gristmill (blue arrow) and the approximate site where Gina was stuck in the river (red arrow):