JW Marriott San Antonio

After we finished up kayaking, we drove just over an hour to the JW Marriott in San Antonio,  This was a last minute addition to our trip.  We spent just 2 nights here, but it was the perfect amount of time.  We had never been before, but I had heard such great things about it. This hotel was only at a 25% capacity.  Again, it felt like we had the whole place to ourselves.  

The water park was awesome.  The kids loved the big slides and we spent a good day and a half there just hanging out.  Just like at the other hotel, there was only 1 restaurant open, besides the pool restaurant.  On our second night we actually ordered the kids room service and let them hang out in the room while the adults went to the restaurant for dinner.   It was the best idea we had all vacation.  The kids had just as much fun in the room hanging out.

As much as I hate the quarantine, the one good thing about it was that never again will the hotels we stayed at this week be as empty as they were.  We'll never have these places to ourselves with no lines and crowds.  

I was so sad the week was over.  We had such a great time with our friends and it was such a nice break and distraction from everything else going on in the world.

Kayaking The Colorado River

We checked out of our hotel on Wednesday morning and headed over to the Bastrop River Company to go kayaking.  I was actually pretty excited about it leading up to it, but my stance on it may have changed by the end.  We loaded up 2 to a kayak.  Emily and I were in 1 while Shawn and Evan were in the other.  The trip we picked was 6 miles long.  We would kayak 6 miles and then a van would come pick us up to bring us back to our starting spot.

The river was high so we had a pretty good current.  We didn't have to paddle, but our friends paddled a bunch, which meant I had to paddle in order to keep up.  Every so often we came to an island in the middle of the river.  We were told to stay to the left of each island in order to avoid the bigger rapids.  I did fine on the first island, but by the second Emily and I were completely backwards.  When Shawn just yelled "reverse" at us, I laughed.  Umm, say what?  Luckily, I was able to figure it out, but that wasn't super fun.  About 1/2 way through the trip, we stopped on the shore for a few pics.  That's when the rain started.  We quickly got back in our kayaks and it poured on us for a good 30 minutes.  So now we were soaked.  I guess it was better than being hot!?

All was well and we were really close to our final destination when we came upon the final island.  Because the water was so high, there was only some tall grass above the water.  Em and I ended up going through the grass due to my poor paddling skills and before I knew it our kayak was covered with hundreds of spiders that decided to jump from the grass and take refuge in our boat.  I'm not even exaggerating how many spiders there were.  Emily and I immediately started screaming and before long Em was in tears.  I actually considered jumping in the river at this point.  But instead I just started tepping on as many as I could with my shoes and hitting others with the paddle.  I'm not sure I will ever get this picture of all the spiders out of my head.  Em and I couldn't wait to get off the kayak at the end!  

It's unfortunate the spider incident happened because up until then it was fun.  But after that, I can definitely say that I have no desire to go kayaking on a river any time soon.

Hyatt Lost Pines

A couple of weeks ago we went to Hyatt Lost Pines in Austin for a few days.   Some of our neighbors came too.  And then we met Shawn's cousin, William, who drove in from Houston.  The Hyatt was only at a 50% capacity so it felt like we had the place to ourselves.  The only downside to it only being at 50% was that only 1 of the restaurants was opened, besides the pool restaurant.  But that didn't affect us too much.  We just ate at that restaurant each night.  

They still did smores and a movie each night.  We just had to grab the smores packs at the front desk.  This worked to our advantage because they didn't limit us.  Let's just say we each left with several full size Hershey bars.  :)

The kids loved night time swimming.  See we had the entire pool to ourselves.  It was great!

Day 2 was spent almost entirely at the pool.  We did do a short bike ride, but it was just too hot to do anything but swim.

We woke up to rain on Day 3.  Since we couldn't swim, we decided to venture outside of the hotel and went to downtown Bastrop for lunch.  We totally lucked out and the rain stopped once we got to lunch and it was all clear the rest of the day.

Wednesday morning we were up early to check out.  Before leaving to head to our next destination we did some kayaking in the Colorado River.