Travels: San Antonio

Being in Ortho residency allows for opportunities to travel to cities to attend conferences and learn about bracket systems and techniques.  A bracket system called Speed hosted a conference in San Antonio and I travelled along with Benjamin!  Luke and his wife Kala also went along and the four of us bunked in newly renovated rooms at the Hyatt on the Riverwalk.  

On the car over, we introduced Kala and Luke to the deliciousness of Crave Cupcakes.  Since it was Thursday, Benjamin was particularly interested in trying the Mint Chocolate cupcake.  Me, I tried the Apple one and it blew.me.away!

Friday the boys went to their conference while Kala and I had a relaxing morning.  After discussing that we should probably do a little site seeing, we decided to venture out to the Riverwalk Center.  Can I just say that it was not as I remembered it from when I was little...  There were more homeless people creeping around and plenty of people staring awkwardly.  Plus, the only store worth writing about is the Everything Purple store.  We did walk down to the Alamo and tada! my one picture of it...

The Alamo is a lot smaller than I remember it being... And I thought there was more of a ceremonious tree lined entry way up to it.  Apparently, my imagination depicted it differently!  Still very cool to see.

The thing we were most looking forward to was dinner on Friday night.  After seeing an episode of Man vs Food Thursday evening, we discussed the possibility of heading to Lulu's for dinner the next night.

What?  You've never heard of Lulu's?  Or Man vs. Food?!  Well you should just take a minute to look it up!

Doesn't that food just look like you could get clogged arteries and diabetes all at the same time?  That's what we were excited about.  All eight of us that were there from Houston all went to have this experience together.

Lulu's is located downtown San Antonio and kind of in a sketchy hood.  But don't let that stop you from going in - the food is amazing!  And very Texas sized!

Here is Luke as he tackles the Sheriff Special - A larger than the plate chicken fried steak and four spoonfulls of mashed potatoes....

What a trooper!  Good thing he had three other people helping him out to eat it!  There were four of us that shared the largest Chicken Fried Steak smothered in gravy.  I will admit that there are only a handful of times that I remember eating chicken fried steak and I believe most of them were at the HBU cafeteria for dinners.  Lulu's Chicken Fried Steak - so good!  And everyone who ate it agreed!!  

After the steak came the cinnamon roll.  Three pounds of bliss!  We passed it around the table and took pictures with it because really, when else are you ever going to eat a cinnamon roll this huge?

Can you tell that we were excited to dig in?  Now, one would think that this cinnamon roll would be either way too hard with no taste or a soggy, uncooked mess in the middle.  Friends, this cinnamon roll was perfection!  It was light and airy with the correct sugar to cinnamon ratio and the icing was delectable!  The sad thing...even with eight of us, there was STILL cinnamon roll left over!

Saturday Kala and I spent the afternoon at The Shops at La Cantera.  She and I agreed that it was one of the best outdoor malls we'd ever been to.  The landscaping was beautiful and they had an awesome selection of stores.  I hear that there is a conference next year at La Cantera...sign me up to go along!

The moral of this story is: The next time you are in San Antonio, make sure to swing by and eat at Lulu's.  If you don't have time for a chicken fried steak, at least try their cinnamon roll.  You can get it to go!