San Antonio day 0

Rachel gave a bit of an introduction so I'm just going to give a couple details.

We bought my ticket Friday, less than 24h before departure.  We got screwed (paying almost twice as much, for a route through Phoenix taking almost twice as long) but not nearly as screwed as I expected to be (e.g., on SouthWest we could have paid 3x).

US Airways has the most comfortable coach seats of any airline I have been on.  I'm not saying they're comfortable on an absolute scale by any means, but they have just enough more padding than everyone else to be noticeable.

My low-end rental car GPS (I told them I'd pay more for a good one, but that was the only model they had) couldn't find my hotel, by name or address.  Finally one of the rental women realized it was near one of their other locations, so I put that in the GPS.  When I got there I found out that it was converted from a Comfort Inn about 3 years ago, so that's how old my GPS's maps are.  I'm guessing that the odds that it will know about all the homes I want to look at are not very good.

The rental car guy was amazingly cheerful for what I don't imagine to be a very stimulating job.  It's all about attitude, I guess.  We talked a bit and he said he had a college-age daughter.  I was startled.  "You look like you're in your thirties!"  He laughed.  "I am.  My mom wasn't happy about that..."

Speaking of the hotel, I goofed and got one off of "the small loop" (410)'s intersection with I-10.  I thought I was getting one near I-35, 10 miles north.  Oops.  Hotels.com gives it two stars; tripadvisor gives it one (ouch!).  I am not picky, though; it has a Wendy's next door, so I'm good.  I do notice that their wireless internet is a lot faster at 3 AM than it was at 9 PM (but still slow).

I talked to an "apartment finder" and a realtor on the phone yesterday morning.  Both said they would email me a list of places by the end of the day.  Neither did.  I'm guessing the commission for finding a renter is not as motivating as a house buyer's.  It would be handy to only have to work with a single agent, since many (most?) of the houses I'm interested in are in the MLS, which I imagine means a keybox and so forth.

Best sites to look on: oodle.com and realtor.com.  Craigslist has almost nothing for SA.  Both oodle and realtor have map views showing all the listings at once, which is far more useful than having to drill down into each listing to get a map showing just that house.  Even the church meetinghouse locator has a modern UI now.  Shocking.

Rachel found the GIS data for San Antonio, which gives me a much better idea of where to look than asking people their opinions.  (Although those are still necessary since I don't know where the traffic bottlenecks are here, and neither does Google.  Yet.)  Basically we are looking for the intersection of college degrees + kids.  (As you'd expect, poverty and college degrees are almost exactly inversely correlated.)  We don't want to be the only ones in the neighborhood with kids in elementary school the way we were in Provo.

There are nine church wards in four buildings for the main area we'd like (south of 1604 on the north side).  Thinking about how to visit all of them from 9 to 4 today makes my head hurt.  (Because the ones in the same building all start two hours apart, I can't just make one trip per building.)