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A San Antonio Wheelchair Trip

A San Antonio wheelchair trip – I had not given this much thought at all.  San Antonio, in my mind, was just a nemesis that the Utah Jazz went head-to-head with on occasion during the NBA playoffs.  But one evening as I arrived from work, I had a conversation similar to the following with my wife:

“Hey”, I call as I enter the door to our house from the garage.

“Hey, how was your day?”, Leslie asks from the kitchen.

“Oh, it was all right”, I answer, as my typical reply.  “How was Paige?”

“She’s fine.  They just got back from San Antonio and she loved the Riverwalk.”

Paige lives a few streets from us and has a salon in her basement.  She has been cutting Leslie’s hair for years as well as Jamie’s.  We have gotten to know her and her family quite well over the years we have lived here – what great people!

Leslie and I discuss some of the attractions Paige mentioned to her in San Antonio and before long, I find myself planning an extended weekend stay in the city, largely because all the photos online I see as well as what I am reading make it clear that a trip there would be wheelchair friendly.  The Riverwalk looks very inviting.

I check out all the places we talk about going and plot them on a map – everything is quite close together as you can see:

Map of stops for our San Antonio Wheelchair Trip

With that, we checked out these three well known and nicely accessible areas of San Antonio:

    • The Alamo and Riverwalk
    • The Missions
    • The Gardens

All made for a relaxed and enjoyable springtime weekend and I will talk more about them in the sections that follow.

The Alamo and Riverwalk

Who hasn’t heard of the Alamo!?  The building itself is quite small as you will see in the photos, but the history is rich and screams of independence and freedom.  As one of the most visited tourist sites in Texas, it is fully accessible with paved walkways throughout.  Some, mainly in the front, are flagstone and slightly bumpy, but nothing to serious.  I imagine they did it that way to maintain the ambience of the attraction. To control the traffic and keep from overcrowding, they only let a limited number of tourists in at a time, so there can be a line to get in and see it.  The back of it has sidewalks and one nice surprise was that they had a living history encampment area where employees in character talked about living during the time of the Alamo.  We were there when a “19th century doctor” talked about medicine and surgery – thankfully it has gotten much better since then! For the Riverwalk, you drop down a story from the rest of the San Antonio area, but there are MANY ways to get there by elevator or ramp.  Check out the government website and maps to see all the places that make it accessible.  Once down there, you are rewarded with a beautiful walk with shops and restaurants.  There is even an area you can hop on a little boat and cruise around for a tour of the area – we really enjoyed it!  A tasty southwestern meal and some ice cream were welcome treat later in the day. You will be able to get around the Riverwalk rather well, though I did notice that to get from one side of the river to the other, not all crossings were wheelchair friendly – some are older and just have steps.  But overall, the city has done a great job at making an area that people with wheelchairs can go.

The Missions

The San Antonio Mission National Historic Park is a wonderful place to visit to get a flavor of the colonization of Texas. There are four missions, all established in the late 17th and early 18th centuries and a walkway following the San Antonio River that connects all of them together.  The distance between the missions is a long walk by itself, let alone with a wheelchair, so we opted to drive to a couple of them. The Visitors Center for the park is located at the Mission San Jose, which also happens to be the largest one and the grounds around it are accessible – it is a nice walk across a large courtyard leading up to the main church building, which is still in use today. There are paved paths leading by what would have been the housing at the time and you get some idea of how many people the community supported. We drove a couple miles, or so, south to the Mission San Juan Capistrano, a smaller mission, every bit as accessible as Mission San Jose.  A paved walkway goes all the way around the grounds, and part of it exits to a nature walk in the area.  The last photo in the series below is the trail exiting the mission and down to the nature walk – nice for about any wheelchair you are using. We did not visit either of the remaining two missions, Concepcion to the north, and Espada to the south, but it looks like in the photos I have seen, that they, too, have paved access.  The best bet would be to contact the park directly to be sure.

The Gardens

We visited the San Antonio Botanical Garden and enjoyed the variety they had built into the facility.  This map will give you some idea on what I mean (it also specifies which terrain in the park would challenge a wheelchair).  The place has a pond and some old buildings that you can get to with some difficulty.  Jamie can walk short distances, so we got her out of the chair to see them.

I even got a smile from Jamie in a photo when we made it to the top of the glass Palm and Cycad Pavillion.

Finally, it was off to the Japaneses Tea Garden, which is a public facility so there is no admission charge.  Much of the area you can get to in a wheelchair, though there are some stone bridges that are not navigable.  Still, it was a lovely place to visit and see how a quarry was transformed into a beautiful garden, complete with a koi pond.

In Closing...

San Antonio was a great trip for our family and all the activities we did were accessible.  Several people, noticing Jamie waving her arms excitedly while listening to music, said we should take a day to go Morgan’s Wonderland, a one-of-a-kind accessible theme park. I looked it up and thought of what a gift San Antonio had in such a facility. Too bad we ran out of time to make it there. As for the Texans, they are a great bunch of folks who I felt had our backs as they were helping us find what we required to have a first class weekend. Leslie posted a vacation experience on Facebook when we returned home.
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