San Antonio
This is going to be a hard city to blog about, so I’m going to get the negatives out right away along with my favorite iphone pictures.
Unfortunately, sometimes things go wrong. I’ve made a bunch of drafts for this post over the past three hours, but I don’t know. I didn’t expect much out of here, but I also didn’t want to miss going to a major south-Texas city.
My train pulled into the city at 1am two nights ago, and after a quick run around the downtown area I felt like I wasn’t missing anything. So, at 1am I biked thirty miles northwest to Government Canyon: a huge forest preserve that when I saw it on google earth I was like “aw hell yeah!”
I’ll talk more about the canyon when I get the big pictures done, but beyond that spot I don’t think I photographed this city as well as I could have. To be honest, I stopped wanting to have a fancy camera out and visible. In the first three hours, I had two different people sick their dogs on me while pedaling by. Honestly, I wasn’t too phased by this, but once over by San Antonio’s fancy Pearl Brewery (probably the most gentrified area of the city) I was approached by a dude holding one of those big, industrial box cutters. He wanted my bike.
Without the knife, I wouldn’t have been threatened by him, but the idea of fighting him off and getting one or more deep wounds from an inch-long razor blade was not something I wanted to deal with for the rest of my trip. I saw a guy in restaurant kitchen clothes, and called out to him to call 911. The box cutter guy immediately split, and I still had all my stuff.
Okay so that was the bad. Could have been a lot worse, I guess. Everyone in the city I’ve talked to thought my bad luck was crazy and not common in the city. One person in particular went on to be extremely hospitable and offer to take me to her friend’s birthday party at a popular dive bar. The night definitely made up for the day, but in the process I missed my train to what would have been New Mexico.
The train only runs a few times a week, so as to not overstay my welcome here, I’ve jumped on a megabus to Austin. We’ll see if I can get back on track once I’m up there.