San Antonio Day 3

We headed out to Mission San Jose this morning. There are four Missions around San Antonio, not including the Alamo which started out as a mission as well. The Spanish expanded their empire using missions. The King paid the Fransican monks to set up the missions and the monks thought they were doing the most holy of duties. The church of the four missions still have active parishes with Fransican priests. The mission still has its outer walls and buildings like the granary. It was quite an interesting place to visit.

Damien was very excited to find a "Five Guys" not far away. Five Guys do great burgers and amazing fries - the really taste of potato and have some skin left on them. We have eaten at Five Guys for three trips now!

We then headed to the Botanical Gardens. The gardens were really nice with some interesting rooms like the fern room, cactus room and the palm and cycad room. They also had some lovely water features and some interesting categories of gardens. They also had some old Texan houses that have been transported from diifferent parts of the area. These are set among the native Texas bush areas. Damien enjoyed taking photos of some of the interesting birds - when they would stay still long enough! It was a really dry, hot afternoon so we didn't spend as long exploring as we would have liked. We headed back to the hotel to cool down and have a bit of a rest.

We were looking for a restaurant for dinner and both came across Dough Pizzeria at the same time. It's a traditional style pizza place who also make their own mozzarella. The pizza is cooked in a wood fired oven and were delicious. The place was really busy but we could see why.

San Antonio has been a lovely place to visit but its time to move on. Tomorrow we head for New Orleans.