San Antonio Riverwalk

The San Antonio Riverwalk area is not to be missed.  It is a strip of shallow canals lined with awesome restaurants and shops.  The atmosphere is great, its shaded and next to the cool water and a great way to escape the sometimes overbearing heat elsewhere in the city.  Lets face it, at the height of tourist season San Antonio can be hot, humid and miserable.  I never understood why people want to flock there during the summer instead of when its much cooler and pleasant in the spring or fall but if you are one of those people then the Riverwalk area is a nice area to cool off without getting soaked by a killer whale.

Same as the bus tour around the streets above the Riverwalk boat tour is highly recommended first thing.  You’ll get to hear much of the history of the Riverwalk, its restaurants and buildings and get to see many views that you cannot by foot. You’ll also get to see the lay of the land which makes trying to find a restaurant you want to try much easier than exploring on foot and trying to decide if you want to eat at this one or see what else is further around the bend.

We had a great time at the riverwalk, everyone was friendly, and courteous and even the ducklings were enjoying themselves.    We had such a good time that we decided to come back on our way home during a weekend when it was packed with people. There was a little more bumping then but not too bad.  All in all I’d recommend coming here any time of year but during the week is a lot better if you hope to get a table outside or get pictures without 30 strangers in them.

Did I mention that the Riverwalk has a ton of restaurant choices…?  Heres a small fraction:

This is the famous Casa Rio restaurant which our river guide told us was the first to open and who’s owner was one of the guys who had the vision of what the river walk could become. There were a lot of naysayers back when this was little more than a neglected murky drainage ditch.  The city made improvements to attract business and the Casa Rio was the first one to take a leap of faith in the face of all the detractors saying it was a horrible business decision.

Now these iconic umbrellas on the Riverwalk are the most photographed site in San Antonio.

Albuquerque has its own Hard Rock Casino now but I’d still never eaten at one, so when we saw this we quickly decided that our hunt was over.

Yum!

Many others include Landries which is one of our favorites back home and we even won some nice coupons for a free meal but we forgot we had them and well you can’t always eat at the same places in different cities, wheres the fun or adventure in that?

Joe’s Crab Shack!  I wish we had one of these back home!

If you have no shame then Dick’s Last Resort is perfect for you! LOL  From what I heard with certain things on the menu the staff can outfit you with one of these hats and you have no idea what it says.  They were pretty hilarious.

While not technically at the Riverwalk we had to have some ice-cream after a hard day shopping and  after the Alamo, Riverwalk, the mall and exploring some of the surface streets our feet really needed a rest.  Motorcycle boots are not made for walking!

After a whole day going through museum gift shops and stores we made out pretty good holding onto our cash and only walked away with a few Hard Rock shirts and this…

Lots of great shopping along the Riverwalk, if we didn’t have to cary anything we bought 1500 miles further on the motorcycle and find some place to stow it I’m sure we would have bought a lot more.  Not being able to carry much is a great way to save money and to sort out what you really want from the impulse buys.

I’ve always loved this building, from one angle this triangular building appears to be a freestanding wall.

Hard to see but all this is a massive mosaic of small tiles that was done for the Jemez Fair.

The Rivercenter Mall is very nice right at the end of the river walk. It’s multiple floors, has an Imax theatre inside and you can hop on one of the boats right from this lower entrance.

The mall also had a small dinosaur exhibit.  These out in the lobby are out there to entice you to pay quite a lot to see the rest of them.  The room is decided up with temporary curtains and judging by how big of a space I could see it was housed in there couldn’t be that much more, this was designed to be a store after all.