texas hill country.

ha. texas hills. that's an oxymoron if i ever heard one. anyway. mom, tim, grandma, granddad and i all piled in the rental car to head out to texas hill country to take a tour of the texas wineries.

the first stop was texas hills vineyards. tim and grandma sampled their wines and bought some to take home, as well.

we also got to be squeezed like grapes!

after a quick stop for lunch at the silver k cafe, we drove onward to william & chris vineyards. i tried the wines here, but i'm a novice wine drinker {so far i only like sweet wines} so the wines at william & chris didn't appeal to me much. but the building is an old farmhouse, it was cute as can be, but i failed to get a picture of the outside. so check out their website to see it.

moving on, we stopped at pedernales cellars. they were even having their annual grape stomp, but i couldn't get anyone to go stomp grapes with me. :( but i did find a little lizard friend. and check out how ridiculously beautiful the skies are. and texas has some pretty cool looking trees.

becker vineyards was next on our tour. mom really liked their tree logo they had on their building, glasses and bottles. and i found a little kitty friend at this winery.

next up was grape creek vineyards. and i feel like i should note that i saw no creek. the san antonio area had not seen a drop of rain in over six months and have had no "significant" amount of rain in over a year. can you imagine? needless to say, the creek must have dried up.

the last winery we visited was sister creek vineyards. located in an old cotton mill, the setting here was really cool. and we got there just in time before they closed up for the day.

we also saw some other cool things along our trip through hill country. like camels. and zebras!

and we even drove through luckenbach, texas. you know, like the song...

...where we missed a great opportunity to ride a cow. yeah, longhorn cattle with saddles. true story. we really missed out.

deep in the heart of texas.

after christopher's ceremony in kingsville, all the family drove up to san antonio for a few tourist-y things.

first, we visited the number one tourist destination in texas, the alamo.

after the little history lesson, we headed down to the number two tourist destination in texas, the san antonio riverwalk. although it was a scorching hot day we saw some pretty sights. i even found alphie!

along the way, we stopped in some of the shops and restaurants alongside the riverwalk. grandma, granddad, mom and i took the riverboat tour and learned some really cool stuff about the history of the riverwalk and the buildings along it.

all in all, i'm pretty sure we walked at least thirty miles over the three days we spent in san antonio. thirty miles. for real.

but that's ok. that helped burn off the calories from the red velvet cake cheesecake i got for dessert at the cheesecake factory one night. or at least 1/3 of them. maybe.