Monday, November 8, 2010

Boo Hoo, No Zoo Boo!

Halloween #2: Zoo Boo

Well, Zoo Boo was a bust. Last weekend, we headed to our favorite place in San Antonio, the zoo, to spend a fun Saturday night dressed in costumes mingling with wild creatures, and some animals, too.

As we approached the first zoo exit off of the highway, we noticed the traffic was stalled to a crawl. Then we saw it. The longest snake we've ever seen!

No, not a real snake, but a snake of cars making its way slowly up the exit ramp heading toward the zoo.

Not one, but all FOUR zoo exits were so backed up with people trying to even get off the highway to get to the zoo that we said, "Ain't no way, we'll go another day".

Jerry decided since we were so close to downtown to take us for an impromptu dinner at the...

...Tower of the Americas. If you've ever been to San Antonio or seen pictures you're sure to have seen the big giant observation tower sticking up out of the skyline like a discarded toothpick.

We heard there was a restaurant up there so we (by we, I mean Jerry), decided to give it a try!

...On a Saturday night.

Without reservations.

In athletic shoes and luckily, our GOOD jeans!

The tower was built as the centerpiece for the 1968 World's Fair. The tower is 750' tall and contains only ground level activities, a revolving restaurant, and an indoor/outdoor observation deck.

Around the tower is Hemisfair Park, named after the theme of the '68 World's Fair.

The teeny tiny bit of the park we got to see was beautiful! We'd been to San Antonio dozens of times but somehow never made it there before this ill-fated trip excursion.

There were sidewalks through lush greenery and Aztec-looking waterfalls,

...and even a cute little boy dressed up as a skeleton!

We decided to go up the tower and wait the 30 minutes for a table at the Landry's Chart House Restaurant which features a revolving floor that will show you the entire San Antonio panorama in one hour.

In case you didn't know, as I increase in years I have also been increasing in a latent fear of heights. I thought it was just open stairwells, like fire escapes (shudder!), but as the glass-enclosed elevator doors closed and we started up, up, up, up, OMG ARE WE EVER GOING TO STOP!, up, I realized my fear had progressed to really tall towers of death.

By the time the elevator doors opened at the top, my lips were tingling and the black curtains were getting closer and closer to the center of my vision.

This is a sample of the view from the restaurant, a mere 550' up. This is as close as I got to the edge. This is using zoom. I was one blubber away from catatonic, people.

We waited 45 minutes for a table while the empty ones revolved slowly around us. We, by we, I mean ME, insisted on giving up and going back down. Down, down, down, HOLY CRAP HURRY UP!, down we went to the blessed terra firma.

Earth. I love Earth. Dirt is good!

We ended up taking the kids to Outback instead. MUCH better!

I promised Jerry we could go back to the restaurant, just the two of us, sometime in this life.

But just thinking about it makes my lips tingle...

...I think I better go lay down, now.