As all Texans and some others know, springtime in Texas brings out the wildflowers. The Texas Highway Department seeds medians and rights-of-way to make traveling more pleasant, but there are also areas where the wildflowers grow naturally. Those natural areas are sought out by travelers from far and wide, and Susan and I make an effort to be among them. This year we were also going to spend several days in San Antonio to see the Alamo and other Spanish missions, and other San Antonio sights, before returning to our homes in Louisiana.

Below is part of a roadmap showing most of the roads we used in our hunt for "wild" bluebonnets, i.e., those not planted by the Highway Department. Flowers along the highway are beautiful, too, but it's something like the difference between seeing animals in the wild and seeing them in a zoo. The map also shows a route Susan and I took later in the week, which I'll tell you about further along.

The prettiest single patch of wildflowers that we found was in Kingsland, on the north side of Lake LBJ at the west end of the lake. As you can see from the picture, the bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes were at their prime and densely packed.

We found a route new to us, Texas Hwy. 2323 from Llano to Fredericksburg, that offered several fields filled with bluebonnets and some yellow flowers I cannot name. Some of the prettiest flowers we found were on the famous Willow City Loop, off Texas Hwy. 16 between Llano and Fredericksburg. On this road you skirt some steep hills, passing one ranch that has Texas longhorns. The Loop also has numerous low water crossings that are one lane, but the only traffic is other bluebonnet hunters, and no one is driving fast.

After a couple of days looking at bluebonnets and other wildflowers, Susan and I moved operations to San Antonio. There, we made the cruise along the Riverwalk, and visited the most famous mission of them all, the Alamo.

The first fact I added to my list from our visits to the four missions in south San Antonio was that each had a chapel that was still active, and apparently had always been. I did not remember that from my visits when I was a kid living twenty-five miles south of the missions. The second fact was that the National Park Service took over the care of the missions in 1978, adding small museums to each along with clean restrooms. There are also rangers at each, along with some volunteer guides, who live to talk about the missions to anyone interested. The third fact I added was that at least some of the missions were much more colorful in their prime.

Each mission had adjacent farmlands, and each had a ranch some twenty to thirty miles away where cattle and goats were raised. The farms were irrigated by a system of ditches called "acequias," at least some of which are still present. If they are not now used for irrigation, they continued to be used up into the twentieth century. San Jose has a mill which has been put back into operation, powered by a vertical axis water wheel driven by water from one of these acequias. You could easily step across the acequia that provides the water for the water wheel, even though it had plenty of water left over for irrigation. Historians are not sure whether any of the other missions had similar mills, or whether all the grain was hauled to San Jose for milling. It seems clear that the San Jose mill had ample capacity to accommodate all the missions, each of which had about one hundred inhabitants.

I knew about the famous Rose Window at Mission San Jose from visits to the mission as a kid, and from my Texas history book in the 7th grade, but I hadn't realized that at least a portion of San Jose, if not the other missions as well, had been colorful in its prime.

We toured the four missions (other than the Alamo, which ceased to be a mission before the famous battle) on our last day, finishing early enough in the afternoon to drive over to Bandera, west of San Antonio. It was still early enough when we arrived there that we drove on to Kerrville, and we had time when we got there to drive up through Hunt, Texas, along the Guadalupe River, looking for the summer camps we'd attended as kids many years ago. To our amazement, since we no longer remembered exactly where they were other than out of Hunt and along the Guadalupe River, we found both. Susan had attended Camp Mystic. The entrance to the camp was closed, but we got some pictures from across the river. Not only was my YMCA camp still there, but it was open that day and we were able to walk around for about an hour before heading back to San Antonio.

Please take me to the Tarpon Springs Cruise!

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