Riverwalk Bus Tour

San Antonio had some awesome double decker tour busses. They are inexpensive and a great way to see the downtown area of the city. Why spend your time looking through fliers and guides to decide where to go and then have to hunt for parking when you can sit back and relax and let someone else do all the work for you.

I highly recommend taking the bus tour first thing some time in the morning.  They will show you the sights and explain a lot of the history and oddities of the various locations and allow you to get your bearings and a good feel of the cities layout for you to plan the rest of the day around.  The buses also make numerous stops along the way at trendy neighborhoods to do shopping or fine dining as well as the historical stops and tourist locations.  You can get off at one stop and explore and get on another bus afterwards using the same ticket.

The full tour is pretty long, I think around an hour or so. My advice, put on some sun screen if you are going to be sitting up top that whole time unless you want to finishthe tour with some badly sunburnt knees like I did.

Of course we had to get pictures of all the interesting San Antonio sights like the giant cowboy with a saddle or the enormous BBQ sauce water tower.

Never seen a Walgreens store sign that looked like this, it must be pretty old.

Hard to see in this picture but the lion picture and people on the side of the Good Will as well as the logo and decorative touches are all done in tile, very cool.

Entering the King Williams district there are many interesting buildings, I liked the stained glass work on this.

We were later told on the River Walk Tour that this Hilton was built for the Jemez Fair.  With such a tight timeline for construction they used an unconventional building method. Esentially the rooms were pre-built offsite and then stacked like lego bricks here.  It was more expensive to build this way but the hotel went up in record time.  There are some pictures of the construction here and some more of the history here.

The Alamodome.

They have a Fuddruckers right next to the Alamo!  Love Fuddruckers but when traveling we always try to be adventurous and eat somewhere new.  If you haven’t had a burger from here, you gotta try it though!