South of downtown are 5 Spanish missions, quite large facilities, and quite attractive. They immediately reminded me of the great Southern plantations: the Big House, the carefully laid-out fields, the numerous outbuildings, and of course, the large population of slave workers. I was impressed by what was accomplished with purely human labor in the South, and this is equally impressive.<\/p>\n
The natives in South Texas were extirpated by the Spanish, but left a “race” of people called Tejanos. I wish there was a better word to describe these mixed populations, but they are slightly different than Mexicans, say, in that the original peoples were a distinct population.<\/p>\n
Since the mission trail follows the San Antonio River, there is now a connection between the downtown Riverwalk and the missions via river tour boats. I’d visited the Riverwalk downtown, a most impressive adaptation to the environment, before but today I got on one of the cruise boats for the tour. For $6 it’s well worth it to see everything in just a short while. I spotted a nice Mexican restaurant along the way and had lunch there.<\/p>\n
Pretty quiet on a Sunday, San Antonio is certainly in the Bible Belt, but the mall and restaurants were open for business.<\/p>\n
Tomorrow I’m going the Choke Canyon State Park, a place I’ve wanted to see for years now. It’s a big reservoir good for birds. I’m not sure whether to expect cell-phone service there or not. Then, on to Rockport.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
South of downtown are 5 Spanish missions, quite large facilities, and quite attractive. They immediately reminded me of the great Southern plantations: the Big House, the carefully laid-out fields, the numerous outbuildings, and of course, the large population of slave workers. I was impressed by what was accomplished with purely human labor in the South, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=497"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":498,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497\/revisions\/498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}