San Antonio - Day 1

I'm writing you from the Grand Hyatt in San Antonio, Texas.  It's June 25th, Sunday, and it's hard to believe I'm here.  In a nice hotel!

So far:  I parked in the renovated East Discount Parking Lot and rode the new monorail system to get to Terminal 4.  Walked around Terminal 4 a little bit (completely redone:  ground floor is still the arrivals, 2nd floor is still departures, and the 3rd floor for the gates, along with a shopping mall.

I've been on two Uber rides, both were fantastic.  I'm loving Uber and will have to download the app at some point in time.

The flight in was bumpy taking off (wind gusts with desert heat), and was bumpy coming in (scattered showers with rain predicted for the remainder of my stay here).

I sat in the last row of the airplane, and thankfully there were two men sitting in the middle and aisle seat of the plane (I took the window) to spend the plane trip talking to and humoring a man who was on the other side of the plane obviously drunk.  A very nice guy, but kooky none the less.  Sorry, I've had enough encounters as a child with drunk men that didn't turn out well, so I'm not even remotely interested in dealing with that.

The River Walk has grown in scale, and now much of the city is built above it - you have to go down stairs or ramps to actually reach the river.  However, they do have the boat rides still, I'm glad to see that.

Once I reached my hotel room, it was all I could do to actually leave again to fetch a bottled water from the hotel's gift shop.  Only to meet up with some of the other people from my employer who was also traveling on this trip.  We ended up taking this really long walk to get to Rosario's, a Tex Mex restaurant that has fantastic food.  I highly recommend reserving a spot in line, as it took a while for us to get seats, but the food was worth the wait.  Very well done.

My only drama for the day was two - fold:  I walked to the Orbit bus stop with suitcase and all, only to find that they don't stop there on Sundays.  By that point my heels of my feet felt like they were on fire due to the slip on shoes I wore and had already packed and locked up my tennis shoes in the suitcase.  I was trying to be thinking ahead to the TSA.  As it was, since I had driven to the airport instead, so there were no lines at the TSA and I was able to take more time in getting everything out of my bags (namely all of the technology) and they did a separate manual search of my carry-on purse (so that I only needed to worry about what was under my seat).  I had plenty of time at that point, so I made a point of thanking them for making sure we are all safe in flying out today.

The second part of the drama came once I reached my hotel room and took all of the technology off of airplane mode.  Family drama started popping up on my Facebook Messenger and I called my Mother to talk to here about it before leaving my room .

Now it's time for me to go to bed and get some sleep.  I'll have to set the alarm, as we are two hours ahead of Arizona.

So far so good for the ISTE Conference, I did go over and checked in, getting my name badge and a bag with stuff I haven't had time to look at yet.  Tomorrow will be a full day, so I guess I'd better get off of here and get to bed!