Leaving Delta behind we retrieved our luggage and grabbed a cab to our hotel. Welcome to The Holiday Inn Riverwalk.

Our hotel had been chosen and booked for us through our Amtrak package. In our travel documents was a voucher  to be presented at check in. I had never traveled this way so I wasn’t sure how it would work out but it was easy. I did have to present a credit card for “incidentals” but that’s just standard procedure in any hotel.

For a Holiday Inn, I was quite impressed.

And it is located right on the Riverwalk.

The river walk winds along the San Antonio river and is lined with restaurants and shops. There are pretty bridges and benches along the way. All we had to do was step out the back side of the hotel and we were on the Riverwalk!

Once we had settled into our hotel room it was time to explore and find a place for dinner. The desk clerk recommended Saltgrass Restaurant and gave us a coupon for a free appetizer.

They told us it was just around the corner. Since it was around 7 pm and quite dark I didn’t bother to bring the camera, just the cell phone.

There were loads of ducks in the river. As we walked along the Riverwalk we got a big kick out of them. They certainly weren’t shy with their loud quack quack quacks!

Eventually we found the restaurant which was so popular that there was a 40 minute wait. Even so every restaurant seemed to be hopping with patrons queued up outside so we decided just to wait. We sat watching the tour boats go by.

We watched horse drawn carriages that were lit up like Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage cross the St Mary St Bridge. they were gorgeous and I vowed to would get a picture before our time in San Antonio was over.

We finally were called and seated around 9 pm. I presented our free appetizer card and got an order of onion strings. OMG! I wish I had taken a picture of that mountain of onion. It was a volcano shaped mountain worthy of a Man Vs Food episode.

Dinner was excellent and as stuffed as we were we couldn’t resist getting the carrot cake dessert to go. Expecting a normal slice of cake we each ordered one. When they brought our to-go boxes and we peeked inside we were looking at slices the size of the island of Manhattan!

Once again we should have taken a picture because no one will believe the size of those slices. Kind of like the fish story about the one that got away!

It took us 3 days to eat through those very good, very big slices of carrot cake. I guess everything really is bigger in Texas.