Remember the Alamo, part II

Yesterday I blogged about a single day spent in Texas. This time I'll be more concise and blog about the entire rest of the trip.

Despite a long day and late night, we managed to make it to hotel breakfast before it closed at 10.  Then, the girls had to do a hotel change so we packed up and checked out.  Luckily, the boys let us store our stuff in their hotel room while we did touristy things for the rest of that afternoon before our next hotel let us check in later that evening.

We got on a sketchy San Antonio bus to ride it about 10 miles outside of town to see some of the San Antonio missions.  The missions were built back in the 1700s by Mexican and Texan Catholics to share the Gospel with the Native Americans.  Or something like that.  Honestly, most of the touristy things we did like the missions and the Alamo had an assumed set of knowledge coming in that none of us had, so it was hard to piece together the whole story.

When we were there, my bestest-grad-school-friend Liz came to visit!  Liz graduated in December with Dave and I:

Back in December, the three of us got our picture taken with Santa Claus.  It may still be the most awkward picture in existence.  

And she has since started a job working for 3M in Austin (about an hour away from San Antonio).  Since that was the closest together we had been in months, she decided to take a day trip to see us :-).

Reunited and it feels so gooooooood!

So we hung out at the missions with Liz, Katie got sunburned, and the rest of us were pretty excited to leave after a couple hours in the hot Texas sun.  But it was a fun history lesson to be had.

Despite the heat, the scenery was BEAUTIFUL. 

After that, we had a ride home with Liz instead of the sketchy bus.  And we went to a reunion dinner (did we skip lunch?  I think we did by accident that day...) with basically ALL of the PSU-lab Alums who were in San Antonio that week.  And their significant others, who a surprising number of them came.  There was even a baby there.  Also, that dinner was at another Mexican place.  Are you seeing a food theme?  I was really in heaven.

After that, Liz and I walked around the River Walk and ate ice cream.  There was a slight bar-outing that night outside at the river walk with the Alumni (let me tell you, drinking wine outside next to a river is pretty great), but we had to get to bed early for conference things in the morning.

Also, I guess I fall into the "alumni" category now, but it feels like I don't yet since I spent the whole week with the current students of the lab.  Which was fun and awesome.  I guess the "recent alum" category + living in State College still (thus, the shared airplane experiences, etc) puts me at an awkward middle state.

 I could write about the conference but it really was just a bunch of boring old dudes talking about their research.  Also, the question "why aren't you getting a PhD?" came up way more often when talking to said old dudes than it needed to.  I really just wanted to say, "because I want to have a real life," but found I had to be slightly more tactical.

Here are a few pictures I took the rest of the week:

We took a river-boat ride, and they gave us food and drinks on the boat!

Since we were at a conference that had about 3,000 participants but only a few hundred women, there was a women's dinner, complete with LOTS of food.

Being models

I mean.  Longhorn cow.  Also, Texas flag umbrella.  

Taking a break next to the river and some trees. 

On Friday, the current lab group had to wear matching shirts.  And pose for a picture that took a million years to get situated.  Ken wanted to hold hands :-)

Walking down the path with matching shirts!

I FINALLY presented on Friday.  Also, my new-friend from Stanford presented right before me.  We were so glad to be done!  

One last night, dinner + wine in an open-air setting.  It was excellent.  After dark is really the only time you can be outside in Texas in summer without dying of heat stroke.  

Our last meal.  SO MUCH CHEESE.  SO DELICIOUS.