Labor Day in San Antonio

We wanted to drive somewhere fun for the holiday but we've exhausted most cities within a 2-3 hour radius. And we just weren't up for a 5-hour drive. So it was back to San Antonio again.
And though it wasn't intended, the day turned into a tour of dead animals.

First stop was Dinosaur Quest. Now why haven't more museums taken this clubbin' approach? The dinos looked way cooler and fierce with colorful lights and harsh shadows.
We saw a wide variety of dinosaur skeletons and some ice age animals too. The kids are very into the Dinosaur Train show right now, so this was right up their alley. Of course, "buddy" the baby T-rex from Dinosaur train is much more tender-hearted than the real T-rex animation they were showing at the museum. Owen wouldn't even walk near the video screen because he was too scared. At our house we call Owen a "chicken tender".
After looking at dead dinosaurs, we headed to the Buckhorn Museum to look at....
dead animals!
This place is funny. It's a restaurant/saloon in the middle and on the outskirts, it's a taxidermy museum. There are animal busts everywhere!
And sometimes, you get the whole bull. I mean, check out those horns! They're longer than me!
I thought this mirror was cool and reminded me of the chotsky version Michael made on Design Star.
Never been this up-close and personal with an elephant.
Mr. Zebra almost smiled.
And Lucy with her prairie skirt looked just like a saloon girl, gazing down from the balcony. She's such a funny girly girl. She actually spent half of our time here, walking around with only one flip-flop on, pretending she was Cinderella. A stranger noticed she had lost her shoe, picked it up, and brought it over to her. Lucy looked down and with a totally fake gasp said, "oh! My shoe! I didn't know it was gone.".....as if she didn't know. Cuckoo.
Of course, fast forward 5 minutes and there I was asking her to look like a serious Mountain man, ready to fire his rifle. So, I can't totally fault her for living in a land of make-believe.
We ended the crazy taxidermy tour in a mini wild-west town (after wandering through 6 rooms of Africa animals, two headed deformed animals, fish, birds, and even shrunken human heads!) I thought this antique screen door with it's crackled blue paint was pretty unique:
and Lucy got a kick out of the old saloon doors. She walked in and out, in and out, watching them swing back behind her.
It was a fairly tame outing overall but fun to see a variety of animals and walk along the River Walk. We've resigned ourselves to the fact that doing really cool stuff with the kids will just have to wait till they're older. They're still totally content with playing at the park. So why drive all the way to San Antonio for that?! Of course, I will drive all the way there for our favorite Main Street Pizza joint but guess what....they were closed! How does this keep happening to us? I guess calling ahead would be a clever idea. So we ended up at Chipotle cause we were too tired and hungry to find anything else. The kids played with a really fun cowboys and Indians set purchased from the Buckhorn museum. And we called it a day. It was Curious George on the DVD player all the way home and then a bit of jumping on the trampoline to get the travel wiggles out.

Hope you had a nice weekend!