San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio - The oldest cathedral in the US
Checking out the "Mission Trail" 
Mission San Jose
The church in Mission San Jose still hosts an active parish
Wednesday June 4
Before we left San Antonio we walked over to the San Fernando Cathedral. It was a beautiful place. Afterwards, we walked back to the RiverWalk and had some ice cream at Ben and Jerry's. Adam's ice cream scoop fell off his cone almost immediately. In his defense, the scoop was way too big for the cone. By the time we were finished, Adam had dropped his ice cream again and both boys were covered in ice cream. Ice cream without a cone doesn't seem right, but we're thinking cups might make more sense when the scoop size overwhelms the cone.
After the ice cream we drove south for a few miles, through some shady areas to the Mission San Jose. It's the visitor center for the "Mission Trail", which is a trail linking the 5 missions in the San Antonio area. The missions were built by Spain, with the help of the Catholic Church, in order to expand Spanish territory and culture. The northern most mission is Mission San Antonio, also known as The Alamo.
The area around the mission was pretty run down. I guess you can't control what grows up around your mission a few hundred years later. The mission was interesting and there were some nice exhibits.
After visiting the mission, we headed towards Austin, but figured we would take the long way in order to see more of the "Texas Hill Country". The topography definitely changed in Hill Country. There were rolling hills with more grass and trees than in the southern part of the state.
We stopped in the town of Fredericksburg. It's a cute little town with a German heritage. There's quite a bit of German influence throughout Texas. We walked around the town sightseeing and looking for a place to eat. We finally picked the Fredericksburg Brewing Company. It had a great ambiance, the homemade beer was really good, and so were the food and the service. I had the sausage sampler platter to experience authentic German cooking. It was really good. The kids even asked for more after I let them try it. We didn't realize until later that the restaurant was also a bed and breakfast with rooms for rent above the restaurant. We probably would have stayed there for the night.
We headed east towards Austin. We stopped in Stonewall at the Lyndon Johnson State Park and drove around some, but the park was closed. We drove east another half an hour to Johnson City - named after one of Lyndon Johnson's relatives and saw another Lyndon Johnson Museum. It seems that the Lyndon Johnson "experience" is split across multiple sites in the area. We found out later that when the Johnson's donated their ranch for a National Park, they mentioned to some influential people that they wouldn't want the land around the ranch to be turned into a cheap tourist area, so the "friends" saw to it that the land surrounding the LBJ ranch was turned into a state park.
We really wanted to see the LBJ ranch and park, but it was dark so we decided to spend the night in the area and tour the park the next day. We didn't like the only hotel we saw in Johnson City so we headed back to Fredericksburg where we stayed at a decent La Quinta.
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