When you fly into New York at night you look down upon an organised circuit board of lights. Approaching San Antonio it looks as if some unholy Titan has vomited a pile of oozing fairly lights across the Texan plains. And where New York is tall, San Antonio seems wide. Wide spaces spanning wide streets bounded by the wide flat sandy buildings of this semi-historic frontier town. Not, I should add, as many wide load folks as I'd expected however.
By the time we'd landed after leaving Detroit's car park of an airport late my body clock had gone well and truly AWOL and it didn't help being woken at 2am the first morning with a public announcement telling us everything was ok?
Conference Hotels are funny places, hermetically sealed environments that tie you into to long days of indoor lighting and dual projector screens. Thankfully it turned out to be a good conference with interesting people met and many things learned. It was also the site of the worst pair of pants in the world - satin blue pyjama bottom style with a Stars and Stripes print - seen hanging off one of the attendees. For anyone who might think that the Yanks can be a badly dressed lot, then the image of this British casualty of sartorial disfunction would have certainly redressed the balance. Even the silver tailed cowboys with their guitar cases couldn't raise half the laugh that these terrible trousers did.
The Marriott backs onto the River Walk, a stretch of over sculpted Disney ride facade with a Mall at either end and the incessant sound of pan pipes playing 80s hits across the plasticised seating areas, occasionally drowned out by the teaming sparrows who seemed to have followed on down from the weekend. I don't even know if it's a real river or not. We did have some halfway decent food there on our last night at least, having decided to bypass the skin tight tops at Hooters, the ugly bloke who seemed to be the only staff member in Coyote Ugly and some English Bar whose staff looked like jailbait in tartan belts.
During our five days my colleagues shopped more than anyone I have ever seen shop; making use of the excellent exchange rate and half-packed suitcases. If I never see another pair of K-Swiss again I'll die a happy man.
If you check out my Flickr set you'll probably guess that the highlight was going to watch the NBA match where a pretty evenly matched San Antonio Spurs took on the Houston Rockets (and unfortunately lost). If nothing else San Antonians are a naturally friendly and welcoming bunch (the easiest way to strike up a conversation is to open your mouth) and the atmosphere was incredible. We even bumped into Big Willy the taxi driver on the way back who recognised us from the taxi queue at the hotel. If you're ever in San Antonio try and get a ride with Big Willy, most entertaining...
So despite seeing very little of the town, which I'm told isn't much, and there being no dedication to Ozzy on the Alamo, or that it rained on our first day, I enjoyed my 6am swims in the outdoor pool, didn't enjoy lunch passing through all too quickly, and was happy to participate in a conversation with some of the finest computing brains at Hewlett Packard during which it was agreed that all web 2.0 means is removing vowels from software names. So rest easy there technophobes, all is well with the www.
And now I'm back having spent far too many hours in airport waiting lounges, flown countless thousands of miles in over-sized Pringles cans at ridiculous speeds and absurd altitudes with nothing worth watching on the movie screens when they were there. I'm still knackered and my sleep patterns are only just returning to normal but there you go. Some people do this kind of thing willingly for a living. If you ever happen to meet them avoid them at all costs. They are insane. Stick to holidays when you can folks.
Tunes: The Rainmakers: Spend It On Love
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