(Click here for more photographs.)

We visited here on our car road trip back in January 2014, just over two years ago.  This time we revisited some places and checked out some new ones.  We stayed at a relatively new RV park on the southeast side of San Antonio, Green Lake RV Resort.  It’s a really nice park with a small lake in the middle and very good facilities.

Naturally, we went back to the downtown River Walk and had lunch and one of the many restaurants there.  We also strolled through the Market Square and El Mercado.  Going south along the river you will encounter a series of 4 missions (in addition to the Alamo which started out as Mission San Antonio de Valero) which were integral to San Antonio’s beginnings.  On our last trip we visited Mission San Jose and this time we also visited Mission San Juan and Mission Espada.

The missions were established by the Spanish not so much with a religious “mission” but as a way to expand their culture and to increase the number of Spanish citizens in this area.  In order to become a Spanish citizen you had to be Catholic so the church was an important part of the mission.  So people from the local indigenous tribes were brought into the mission and taught agriculture, English and the Catholic religion.

Next Stop:  Port Aransas, TX (Corpus Christi)