We made it to San Antonio to watch the Auburn Tigers participate in the Men’s College Basketball Final Four. Please see the last post about the trip from home to Texas.
Auburn put up a good fight, but was really no match for Florida on that particular day in that particular game. It was such a great and memorabile season that we really enjoyed, regardless.
Since Auburn did not make it to the championship game (they lost on Saturday), we were able to enjoy some time in San Antonio doing the tourist thing and getting in some very scenic bike miles on Sunday.
If you were going to go to downtown San Antonio to ride your bike, I would recommend that you not try to ride exclusively on the riverwalk. The scenery is awesome, but there is a reason it is called the River”walk”. The trail winds all around following the “river,” more like a canal. On this weekend, it was particularly difficult to navigate due to the excess of pedestrian traffic from the events.
Instead, I would recommend that you drop down to the Riverwalk and ride a section between one or two of the bridges and then go back up to the bike lanes at street level for a while. San Antonio does have some very good downtown bicycle infrastructure.
We parked on the north side of San Antonio and rode as much of the Riverwalk as we could before turning around and heading back to the truck to pack up the bikes for lunch. As luck would have it, we were able to load up the bikes and drive down to a parking deck that was right behind where we were meeting the rest of the crew for lunch on the Riverwalk.
One side note here, we were SEVERELY OVERCHARGED for parking in this garage, as we were only there for about an hour and the fee was only charged by the “day.” It cost us $45 bucks for that hour. The rate for the garage is not posted anywhere except for at the kiosk where you pay, which is inside the garage. You have to enter, park, and then go pay. By then, it is too late to decide not to park, as you cannot leave the garage without a receipt. Price Gouging, or at least Deceptive Trade Practice at its finest! San Antonio, you can do better.
After lunch we had plans to head to the south side of San Antonio to ride another trail that eventually connected with the Riverwalk trail from the south. That trail report will be in the next post. So watch for that. It was beautiful.
Since we had paid for the ridiculous parking spot, we decided to take a little time and walk some of the Riverwalk while the rest of the crew did the totally touristic thing and hopped on a boat tour. I grew up in San Antonio, so I had already been there done that many times and so we opted to walk a bit before heading back to the garage to head out to ride again.
Ride with GPS Route
Below is the embed for our actual Ride with GPS profile ride from this trip, you can click on the title for more details.
