Our first stop yesterday was the San Antonio Japanese Tea Garden. My view of gardens is that they are OK when done in moderation. This garden is different. Walking into the garden was like walking into Shangra La. It was stunning. They converted a stone quary to a garden, which sounds prosaic. But the way they did it was astonishing. We had to stop and just take it in before walking around. It helped that we arrived early. The garden opens at 7 AM. We had the place to ourselves, which enhanced the feelings of peace and tranquility. And this was the effect in the winter, when much of the vegitation was brown. The pictures of gardens I take never represent what I see in the garden. I’ll leave the pictures to thse who want to visit the website.

From there, we went to the Witte museum. I expected this to be a typical science museum, but it was much better than that. They focused on telling the stories of inhabitants in Texas, from the dinosaurs to the 1850s. In this case, “inhabitants” includes wildlife and plant life — in other words, ecology. I thought the dinosaur exhibit was typical of what one would see in any other museum. But the rest of the presentation was first class. We spent several hours learning about the five ecology zones in Texas as well as human inhabitants, both ancient and modern.

Before leaving San Antonio, I can’t help but ask the purpose of this sign. It doesn’t seem to give pedestrians the right-of-way to cross the street. It doesn’t signal motorists to stop or even yield. But it did turn on flashing lights and we did survive the crossings.

After that it was time to leave San Antonio and move on to the dude ranch. We survived our first horse ride, had a Texas cowboy dinner, followed by a campfire. Pictures are on the website.

We had three perfect experiences in one day. Does that make a vacation trifects?

I hope this finds everybody doing well.