San Antonio thoughts

Looked at 20 houses, found 1.  That's a lot of houses.  If you try to do this with kids, plan on taking several days just to see them.

All yards are fenced.  All of them, with 1x3 boards that are never stained or weatherproofed and thus start falling apart as soon as they are built.  I'm convinced that you can date a neighborhood by how badly the fences are sagging.

There are no public playgrounds in suburbia.  (I remember at least one downtown, so they do exist there, at least nominally.)  Private per-subdivision playgrounds are scarce.

The freeways have signs up reading, "Don't slow texas down: slow traffic keep right."  This is awesome.

There is a very very high percent of people who apparently think "slow" means "more than 5mph under the speed limit."  Not so awesome.

My real estate agent, whose definition of "slow" matches mine, says she's never been ticketed for speeding in San Antonio.  "Only by state troopers on the way to Austin."

IHOP is like the official state breakfast restaurant.  I have never seen a denser population of IHOPs anywhere.

I like the access/frontage road system.  Takes up lots of space but you are never far from an on-ramp.

You absolutely need a GPS to navigate here.  Unfortunately, my rental sucked and could never locate the address I wanted.  So I'd have to google it on my iphone and try various nearby interections until I came up with a combination that it liked.  Hopefully our newer GPS won't have this problem.

The Thai restaurant I ate at last night offered me chopsticks and a fortune cookie.  WTH?  You wouldn't eat Mexican food with processed American cheese on it, would you?  Sheesh!  The duck curry was good, though.

(We did the tourist stuff when we were here as a family so I won't repeat anything about that here.)