San Antonio Texas
 

Hello everyone.

I live in Ireland ( if you want to ask me anything about there, no problem!).

Anyway, my husband has a relative who passed away in San Antonio a few years ago. He wants to go visit his grave and see where he lived. He is Irish too.

So, trying to find a way to get there from Dublin. Seems to me a good way would be to go direct from Dublin to Washington DC and spend a few days there (the pre clearance in Dublin is great, when you arrive it is as if you were on a domestic flight, straight out the door at the destination!) God Bless America for doing this. Then take a flight from Washington to San Antonio. But I can work around this. There are other connections direct from Dublin to the States, but we have seen them all apart from Chicago and Washington. I am torn between Chicago and Washington for the first stop on the way to San Antonio. Advice please!

My question is, how many days would you recommend for San Antonio? We just want to visit the grave and meet with people he knew and catch up a bit. Also obviously want to see downtown San Antonio!

Thanks and I will clarify later if my post was not clear enough.

Thanks so much for your replies. Hope to travel late September.

Hmmm didn't know about DFW with AA from Dublin, will check it out. Husband might like to see Southfork, we are older and remember it you see! Great suggestion thanks.

So two days in SA is enough. That's a good indication. Might go back via Washington DC. Why not if we are travelling the distance anyway.

Very much appreciate your help here. Looking forward to seeing Texas!

Hello,
We went to San Antonio two summers ago. We spent about 2.5 days touring, but one of them was almost exclusively an amusement park. We wished we'd had 1-2 more days. I intended to write a short trip report. Essentially, that's what this is. Hopefully this will help you plan.
What we did:

1. The downtown Riverwalk is fun, you can take a boat ride and have a meal, shop. This would be a good place to hang out for a meal with your relatives. You may wish to make reservations if it's high season. There are numerous restaurants along there.
2. Tour the Alamo (truthfully this takes little more than an hour, even watching the short film)
3. See the Alamo lit up after dark (this was actually my favorite part of the Alamo)
4. Tour the Historic Missions. We spent about 4-5 hours on this. For both my son and I, this was the true highlight of San Antonio. Unlike the ones in California, these feel a bit neglected, but they still are fascinating and the staff were very knowledgeable, especially at San Jose.
   https://www.nps.gov/saan/planyourvisit/index.htm
   
5. Visit El Mercado/ Market Square, the largest Mexican market in the United States. And eat at the fun, kitschy and really good 24-hour bakery.
   https://www.visitsanantonio.com/location/market-square/
   https://www.mitierracafe.com/
   
6. See the Cathedral, which is just a 10 min walk from the Riverwalk, and in the downtown. I especially liked the little chapel in the back and found it interesting seeing an image of the Virgin Mary from the Canary Islands. Again, who knew? I was not there to see the light show, sadly.
   https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attracti...nio_Texas.html
7. See the Governor's palace. This was my second favorite place in San Antonio as it really gives you a feel for the colonial architecture with the period furnishings etc. And it is just a lovely, peaceful place. It is next door to the cathedral. There were some awesome maps showing the different boundaries of Texas there. I had no idea how much that all changed over time.
   https://www.spanishgovernorspalace.org/
8. We also visited 6 Flags for my son.

What we did not see and wished we did:

• 1-2 museums in San Antonio I wanted to see, but based on our short trip, our only time for them was a Monday and they were closed.
• We wished that we had gone to Texas Hill Country. This is somewhat dependent on time of year, but it looks really pretty.

Austin is 1 hour away by car. In fact, we flew into Austin and drove to San Antonio because flights were much cheaper.
We saw:

• University of Texas Austin
• South Congress Bridge flying of the bats (thousands of them at dusk, very cool).
• Ate at a cool place on South Congress

What we wished we did in Austin:

• See the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library

LBJ Presidential Library

Thank you 5alive for taking the time to give all that information. Very much appreciated. I will check out your links later.

Austin is not on our itinerary, but you never know! We had not intended to hire a car really but that sounds like a short hop from SA to Austin. Husband loves country music so I suppose we could find that in Austin. Will keep it in mind anyway.

Great information and thank you all again. I am really looking forward to seeing the Lone Star State, even if we only make it to SA!

Might be back with some more questions, if I am, I know you kind people will help me out.