Sea World?

We travelled for days nearly getting lost and running out of gas in in the back woods of Texas after our Garmin mistook a cattle trail for a highway and we endured sweltering heat, wind, poisonous fumes and hula-hooping embarrassment all to see killer whales doing tricks.  What do we find?  CLOSED!!   Maybe we are just early…  Thats gotta be it, Sea World cant be closed.     No, wait, it IS closed!   WTF Man!?

I felt exactly like Clark Griswold. If there had been a moose around I would have punched it.

Yep, turns out we arrived too early in the season while the park is closed 3 days a week.  Well crap..  NOW what do we do?

Cece decided we should go to the Alamo so we plug it into the GPS and onward!   For the first time ever my Garmin’s traffic alerts come on and start working giving us warnings and highlighting slowdowns and blocked routes on the map.  Pretty sweet, too bad the traffic features apparantly do not work anywhere in the entire state of New Mexico, not even in Albuquerque.  I was happy that the traffic radio does work and I was not ripped off and sent the wrong thing by Amazon like I had been suspecting, however, our digital navigator again led us astray taking us through several sketchy neighborhoods and the wrong way down one way streets.

Eventually I just made note of the general dirrection we needed to go and ignored our GPS completely to try and find a main thoroughfare and we ran smack dab into this.

Its hard to convey just how big this church complex was.  There was 3 enormous cathedral like buildings right next to each other, every one of which would have been impressive on its own.

Eventually we made it to downtown and right into the Alamo.  Unfortunately then comes the real adventure, finding parking!

Wow a real live Woolworths, or at least what used to be one.  I couldn’t help but think of this:  Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? – Stay Out of the Woolsworth

Parking gets more expensive the closer to the Alamo you are but more importantly for us, we wanted somewhere with shade! Many of the lots looked very shady too with cars tightly crammed in spaces where the bike might get wrecked like has happened before or without any curbs or protection from someone just stealing our stuff or the whole bike.

Round and round we rode.  Aimlessly we made several passes before settling on a lot right across the street from The Buckhorn Saloon.

Apparently the owners of The Buckhorn used to take horns and antlers as payment for drinks back in the day and and over time they had amassed one of the biggest collections of antlers in the world.

These Irish Elk would have been something to see, even this crudely made one was impressive. Too bad they went extinct around 8000 years ago, I would have loved to have seen one.