November 21-24, 2023: Thanksgiving in San Antonio
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Well, another year is coming to an end, and the last event that we have pictures for was our return trip to San Antonio just two weeks after Thanksgiving to help Ron and Karl celebrate their birthdays.

Getting to the Ruckman's House in San Antonio

You have probably seen an album page where we visit San Antonio, but in case you haven't, I want to show you the route to San Antonio from Dallas and where Prudence and Ron and Guy are located.

On the left-hand map below, you can see the normal route from Dallas down to San Antonio. Not much explanation is necessary; sometimes we take the bypass around Austin, but most times we don't, and the trip to the San Pedro exit in San Antonio is usually four hours plus.

We head north on San Pedro Avenue a couple of miles and then either hang a left on Ashby and a right on Breeden or just a left on French to get to the Ruckmans' house on the northeast corner of Breeden and French.

In case you have not seen them, I have put below first an aerial view of the Ruckmans' house (it is the house on the corner and the garage/apartment building north of it where Guy lives) and a front view of the house (taken in 2010).

Ron and Karl's Birthdays

Ron's birthday is the 8th and Karl's is the 10th, so they are usually celebrated together, but with separate dinners out for each of the birthday boys.

From Ron's Birthday

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At Karl's dinner, his pyrotechics included a kind of "roman candle" doohickey that took the place of candles on a birthday cake. I'd not seen one before, and Fred made a short movie of it. Use the player at left to watch.

We had a really nice dinner and then returned to Ruckman Haus for some cake and coffee.

At Ruckman Haus after Karl's Dinner

A Visit to the San Antonio Botanical Garden

On the afternoon before Karl's birthday dinner, Prudence, Fred, and I went over to the San Antonio Botanical Garden to walk around in the beautiful sunshine. The garden is always enjoyable, and we always take pictures. You may have been here with us before, but the gardens are continually changing, so only some of these pictures may be repetitive.

Getting to the San Antonio Botanical Garden

We headed over to the Botanical Garden in the late morning, intending to have some lunch there after our walk around the gardens.

Getting to the Botanical Garden from Ruckman Haus is a piece of cake; it is just over on the other side of Broadway only a couple of miles from the house.

The 40-acre, non-profit Botanical Garden was first conceived in the 1940s by Mrs. R. R. Witt and Mrs. Joseph Murphy, who organized the San Antonio Garden Center. The two went on to develop a master plan for a city botanical center in the late 1960s. The site of the master plan was a former limestone quarry and waterworks area owned by the city. Voters approved $265,000 in bonds in 1970, which was the catalyst for funding the new gardens. Ground was broken for the new facilities on July 21, 1976 and the San Antonio Botanical Gardens officially opened to the public on May 3, 1980.

The gardens have had two major additions since opening. On February 29, 1988 the Emilio Ambasz designed Lucile Halsell Conservatory opened to the public and later that same year the historic Sullivan Carriage House was moved brick by brick to the botanical garden. Restoration of the building began in 1992, with formal dedication in 1995. The botanical gardens has also just completed a major expansion, and the entrance has been moved from the Sullivan Carriage House to a new entry plaza about 200 feet south.

We wandered through the gardens for quite a while today, seeing just about everything and taking lots of pictures.

To help organize the pictures we took, and to help you follow us on our wanderings, I want to use the garden diagram that is available at the entry plaza. I have reproduced that map at right, and I will try my best to tell you where we went by referring to the numbers on the map.

I think this will be better than trying to draw a continuous path on the map, as we did a lot of wandering back and forth. So please come back to this map frequently if you want to see just where in the garden something in particular can be found.

The Halsell Welcome Building (1)

After parking, we used our membership at the Dallas Botanical Garden to get the three of us in through the entry pavilion. The gardens were decorated for Christmas, and just inside the entry there was a display of artificial flowers off to our left, and these were a nice backdrop for a couple of pictures:

Nearby, there were some large "disco balls" in trees and on the ground. These multi-faceted decorations offered some intriguing picture opportunities, which Fred took full advantage of.

The Zachry Foundation Culinary Garden (3)

Just to the right as you pass the entry pavilion there is a walkway between two administrative buildings that leads to the eZachry Foundation Culinary Garden. This small garden and area are devoted to plants that are used for food- either vegetables, fruits, or seasonings. The Dallas Arboretum has a similar garden in its new expansion area called "A Tasteful Garden".

We wandered around this garden area for a bit, and here are four other pictures that we took while we were here:

Back out on the main walkway heading into the gardens, we found more decorations for the season:

The Family Adventure Garden

The Family Adventure Garden is just that- a garden that is slanted towards kids (with much to do and things to climb on) but which also provides adults with much that they can see and enjoy. I took quite a few pictures here, and the ten best are below:

Walking to the Halsell Conservatory

Our exit from the Family Adventure Garden brought us back out onto the main walkway, where we were again in the midst of the Christmas decorations- including the "disco balls" scattered around.

The Lucille Halsell Conservatory

The Lucille Halsell Conservatory is a series of large greenhouses, each devoted to a particular kind of vegetation. These are always interesting to go inside, but we have been in them so many times before that we only went through one of them this time. Coming up to the Conservatory, we found more colorful decorations (many of which are used during the Light Festival that is going on again this year (and which we attended a few years ago).

Here are more pictures of these very colorful decorations:

At left are some more pictures of the decorations outside the Conservatory, and below is a movie I made as we went through one of the greenhouses- this one devoted to tropical plants:

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The Rose and Old-Fashioned Gardens (14)

We left the Conservatory area and walked a bit southwest to the oldest section of the Botanical Garden, passing the exit arch for the Light Festival, not nearly so spectacular as when it is lit up at night. Here, there are a series of formal and specialty gardens featuring brick-bordered beds. There was also a series of Rose Gardens, along with other specialty gardens such as the Sacred Garden, the Shade Garden, Gertie’s Garden and other garden displays like the Herb Garden, which is tended by volunteers.

These gardens are not isolated, but intermingled. And other than the plant varieties themselves, the individual garden areas aren't delineated or labeled. So all I can do here is to simply show you the various pictures we took in this area of the Botanical Garden.

Fred always likes to spend tome time in the Rose Garden, looking to see if there are any varieties he might like to collect. But things were pretty sparse at this time of year.

Ready for lunch, we walked to the Sullivan Carriage House (12), passing some ornamental kale and a neat fountain. The kale got a picture, but the fountain deserved a movie.

We had a nice lunch in the restaurant before returning to Ruckman Haus to get ready to go to Karl's birthday dinner. That was enjoyable, and the next day Fred and I left for home.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.

	November 21-24, 2023: Thanksgiving in San Antonio
	Return to the Index for 2023