Househunting in San Antonio

I can’t believe how far I have fallen behind on blogging. Last month Abe and I decided to take a trip to San Antonio to look for a place to live. I was going to go by myself since Abe doesn’t have any time off these days but the doctor he was looking for was nice enough to let him have some time off and my mom was nice enough to watch the kids so we could go. Although it was complicated to get the kids to Richmond and meet up in San Antonio, since I had already bought my ticket when Abe decided to come, it was worth it. We have such a time nice exploring the city, looking at houses and just having a kid free long weekend. When I booked the trip I had no idea that it was “Fiesta Week” in San Antonio. It’s some big cultural event in the city but it really just meant that all the nice hotels were booked, traffic and parking were horrible, and everyone was taking random days for holidays. We did find a cute bed and breakfast to stay at. It was on a very quiet end of the riverwalk until the day when they had a big Fiesta party right outside our window. It was the one day that I really wanted to take a nap and relax after looking at houses all morning. It wasn’t going to happen with the loud latin music blaring all afternoon.
I wanted to surprise Abe with a nice dinner for his birthday while we were out there but I never have good luck when I try to surprise him. He always either figures out the surprise or does something to ruin it. I should be prepared for it by now but I still try. I was going to try to surprise Abe by staying at a hotel (we were going to spend the whole trip at the house of a friend of a friend) but since Abe was arriving first and I didn’t get there until 5 hours later I couldn’t figure out a good way to work out my surprise. So the dinner was my last hope for a surprise. I thought I could get him to walk with me along the riverwalk until we came to the restaurant, an expensive steak restaurant. But of course we were running late so I had to rush him along for our reservation time and he totally caught onto my plan. I picked the restaurant based on the lovely view of the river and the romantic atomosphere. Here is what is looked like on their website.

Little did we know that because of Fiesta week they were going to put up an ugly wooden fence and have loud, bad music playing and lots of people drinking and partying right beside our table and we could barely talk over the noise. Here is the picture below from our table. It was almost funny how bad my surprises turn out. But we did enjoy our time hanging out on the riverwalk.

So while we were there we spent most of the days looking at rental properties. We thought we had a lot of options from the online searches we did before we left but we quickly learned that pictures can be very deceiving. Most of the houses had not been well taken care of, were dirty, or weren't even honest about the number of bedrooms they had. Our favorite house was the one where the formal living room consisted of piles of clothes and 3 guns laying on the floor. The living room was two camp chairs, a big screen tv, and can of dip. Abe said he counted around 15 guns just laying around the house in every room. Having noticed a car in the driveway when we came in I couldn't help but think that they could be in the house and these were not people that I wanted to surprise. I think I held my breath the whole time we were in the house. Finally on the last day Abe was there one house lowered their price and came into our price range so we went to take a look. We are excited because this house is just a few blocks from the church and walking distance to the elementary school. It is right off the interstate for Abe's job and right behind a huge shopping center with Target and Kohl's. So here are a few pictures of the house. We will have a guest room and lots of space so I hope we get lots of visits from friends and family.

The formal sitting room has a pool table that the owner has left in the house. Maybe we will have to take up pool.

We are so excited about the move, although we will really miss our great friends here. Ethan is counting down the number of Sundays left until we move. It is nice that he is so excited.

And since no post would be complete with out some pictures of the kids here are a few from Easter.