They gave me a cream colored 2008 Chrysler PT Cruiser. Joy. The car has a smaller 4cyl engine than my S-10, but weighs more. Luckily, Texas isn’t all that hilly.
Called Matt after leaving the Enterprise lot and followed directions over to his place on the west side of San An. The rest of Sat was just spent relaxing and catching up with Matt and Juneiva.
Sunday rolled around, and the three of us went over to Whataburger for lunch, at which point we split up, Matt and I taking the rental to head over to the SCUC area, where both Matt and I had lived back in middle and Jr. High schools.
We started off by heading over towards Randolph Air Force Base. Not only would they not let us on the base, they wouldn’t even let us take pictures of the “Taj Mahal” from the main gate.
In retrospect, this should have been our first clue.
We drove from Randolph through Universal City and to Cibolo, where I took a couple drive-by shots of J. Frank Dobie, where I went to half of sixth grade. What used to be a large field behind and beside Dobie is now housing….a lot of it.
We then went over to Schertz, and I shot Ray D. Corbett Jr. High school from across the street before Matt and I headed into the development I used to live in. I recognized the old house at 1308 Oak Street by the tree on the left that Shawn and I used to climb to get on the house’s roof. Stopped the Cruiser and pulled my camera out, intending to go knock on the door to get permission to shoot the front of the house. Walking towards the house, I went to turn on the camera and noticed the batteries were dead, so I went back to the car to put new ones in. While doing so, the policeman for Bexar County (Which Schertz is not in, being in Guadalupe), who now lives in the house came out and walked over to me, asking what we were doing.
I was honest with him, and told him I had lived in that house back in the late 80s and wanted to take a picture of it.
He asked for my driver’s license.
Yep, southern po-po. What you gonna do? So, not content that he is not flustering me, he starts asking me why my license is from Florida but the plates on the Cruiser are Texas. I calmly explained about the theory of rental cars, and that I had picked it up at the airport.
He pointed out it didn’t have a rental sticker on it. Matt pointed the sticker out to him, at which point he asked why I was in town and where I was staying. Matt gave the guy his address, and then he asked Matt for HIS driver’s license, writing information down the whole time. Now I am starting to get annoyed at this guy. I am on a public street, just looking at an area I happened to have once lived, and he’s trying to give me the go-around. He wrapped up, stating he had no reason to hold us and that we were free to go. I resisted the urge to take his picture to post online. So we left the area, and I didn’t take any more photographs the rest of the day.
Honestly, though, it only reinforced memories of how the area was, and, if anything, it has become even more run down and squalid than when I used to live there in 87-89.
Monday, though, was completely different. After a few games of Ghost Recon, in which Matt and I kicked ass….eventually, that is, we headed into downtown.
We scoped out the Alamo and a couple of the Missions, walked along the River Walk before having lunch over at Fuddrucker’s.
After lunch, we walked through and hung out at HemisFair park, going up in the Tower of the Americas. That open-front elevator still wigs me out, but I am better able to deal with it now.
Once we had spent some time there, we went back to the rental car and headed south, where I wanted to check out the Texas Air Museum branch at Stinson field. It is a small museum, but it has a couple of pretty rare birds, like a 1914 Christofferson, Northrop F-89 Scorpion, and a Focke-Wulf Fw-190 A-7, among others. Unfortunately, the collection is in pretty bad shape, as you can see from the pictures.
From there, purely by chance, Matt noticed a sign for an aqueduct, and we drove over, finding ourselves at the Espada Aqueduct. That was really cool, considering all the history behind it.
Monday was definitely our best “going places” day, and we capped it off by heading to the other side of San Antonio near Lackland to meet up with Nate for dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings. Nate’s changed a tonne, and yet not at all, and I’m sure he would say the same about me.
After Nate left, Matt and I headed back to his place, where Juneiva kicked us BACK out to the bars, since she wanted some time for herself. I can’t blame her, spending time with a pair of geeks gets tiring, especially when they are rambling on about Naval weaponry and the like.
Though we really didn’t go anywhere, Tuesday was my favorite day in San Antonio, because it was just Matt and I chilling out. I’m a simple man, I like just spending time with the people that are important to me. We played a lot of Project Gotham and watched parts of movies and some episodes of Futurama.
Oh, and a gratuitous full frontal shot of the little milk truck rental ;)
