Best of The Best: Winter Holidays in San Antonio, TX
If you are looking for a memorable vacation that will be delightful for the whole family, we recommend San Antonio, Texas. San Antonio is a great destination to enjoy the Winter holidays. During the Christmas season, festive, sparkling colorful lights adorn the majestic trees along the Riverwalk. The best way to describe it? It’s simply enchanting!
The San Antonio Riverwalk features a wide variety of restaurants, shopping and tourist attractions. The Alamo is located in the heart of the Riverwalk area on an upper plaza. This year, the city added additional exhibits to give visitors an even more expansive sense of what the Alamo and surrounding area would have been like historically.
Hilton’s Palacio Del Rio
The San Antonio Riverwalk is home to several memorable hotels. If you are looking for a hotel with a balcony on the Riverwalk, we recommend the Hilton Palacio Del Rio. We enjoyed a 7th floor balcony room. It had a great view of the Riverwalk, comfortable beds and a scrumptious breakfast buffet in the morning.
Hilton’s River’s Edge Cafe offers a delectable breakfast buffet including American-style breakfast (eggs, bacon and sausage, baked french toast and pancakes) as well as fresh fruit, fruit juices, pastries, and yogurt parfait. They feature an oatmeal bar and gourmet salad as well.
The hotel is part of Hilton’s Curio Collection, which features unique and remarkable hotels in sought-after destinations. It is a hacienda-style hotel and made us feel as if we were visiting a Spanish hacienda with Mexican artistry throughout as well to create the unique and picturesque San-Antonio feel.
The best part of staying in Hilton’s Palacio Del Rio was the view from our balcony! The twinkling lights stay on dusk to dawn.
The Rivercenter Mall
The San Antonio Riverwalk also hosts the Rivercenter Mall. The Rivercenter Mall provides ample shopping opportunities as well as dining and large department-store browsing. Two superlative experiences for children and adults alike include a visit to Sea Life and It’s Sugar which are both located in the Rivercenter Mall.
Sea Life
When we first passed by Sea Life at the mall, we could not tell from the website, photos or the Sea Life counter what the experience would be life or why we would want to visit. Malls are not the typical place one finds an aquarium exhibit. Yet to our delight and surprise, we had a wonderous ocean underworld waiting for us two stories below the surface of where we were standing. Right before we got into the elevator, the manager told us, “This mall noise you are hearing right now disappears when you go down the elevator.” He was right! Just a few moments later, we were surrounded by a world of tranquility and highly-memorable immersive experiences! Who knew?!
It turns out that Sea Life is one of our most favorite aquariums we have ever visited!
What we love about it is that the displays are vibrant, colorful and well-lit, adding intrigue and amazement to the educational experience. They feature many creatures, including lesser featured ones, and give visitors an up-close-and-personal view of them. For example, we saw bright red fire shrimp interacting with several seahorses. They also have a lobster exhibit which includes 3 types of lobsters. We have never seen lobsters interacting in an ocean exhibit. We usually only see them in lobster tanks at the seafood department of the local grocery store, so it was a great treat and a unique experience. The exhibits also included a variety of eels.
Sea Life also answered one of the questions we had been asking just a few days before: What fish live in the San Antonio River? The first exhibit we visited featured the fish that live in the San Antonio River!
What we appreciated most about Sea Life is the overall experience and ambiance. As you visit the exhibits, you are surrounded by relaxing spa music, shimmering ambiance lighting, and tranquil displays of vibrant aquatic life. Sea Life is a place where spa meets sea meets shopping mall.
Sea Life is truly a “best of the best” aquarium exhibit.
It’s Sugar
The Riverwalk hosts many restaurants which are enjoyable for the whole family. But if you are looking for a “culinary” experience for kids, we recommend visiting It’s Sugar. It’s Sugar is a self-serve candy store which features candy by the pound. The candy is spread out in bins across the store. Any child who walks through the door becomes a literal kid in a candy store! Their eyes widen. Usually, the candy clerk is sampling candy.
The day we were there, we sampled gummy butterflies – and then we promptly bought some. The candy quality is okay, not good or great. But the experience itself is what lingers in the minds and hearts of the children who get to enjoy it for years to come. There is something superlatively sensational about having your parent to tell you to get a bag and choose any candy you want. That opportunity is definitely a child’s version of the “best of the best”!
The Alamo
After we visited It’s Sugar, we walked out onto the cobblestone streets on the street level and visited the Alamo Plaza. The iconic Alamo is located right in the midst of San Antonio’s downtown. The city has added additional exhibits this year to expand educational understanding of the history and experience of the Alamo and the entire mission complex. Guided tours of the Alamo are free and an essential experience of San Antonio’s “best of the best” history!
Cavalier
If you are looking for a “best of the best” dessert spot, we recommend Cavalier. Cavalier, located inside InterContinental San Antonio Riverwalk, is an upscale dining venue. We ordered the Seasonal Brownie Tarte and the homemade Horchata Ice Cream. The Brownie Tarte is a generously-sized chocolate tarte with an underlayer of brownie and carmel. The waiter shaves white chocolate over your dessert to create “snow”! And every bite is delectable! The homemade horchata ice cream was equally delicious. Dessert at Cavalier is a great way to finish off your day at the Riverwalk shopping, sightseeing and strolling!
San Antonio Zoo
The San Antonio Zoo is one of San Antonio’s most iconic legacy attractions. The San Antonio Zoo is a 110+ year old historic zoo. It premiered the first open-air (non-caged) animal exhibits in the country, using a moat system instead, and letting the animals roam more freely in a natural habitat.
For example, the bears are out in the open and do not have plexiglass enclosures as is the case with many other zoos, because they have moats instead!
To our delight and surprise, we saw several precious baby animals at the zoo the day of our visit! We visited an almost 1-month old baby Capybara, a baby Gibbon with its Mama, and an 18-month old Giraffe named Waffles!
The San Antonio Zoo features many interactive exhibits. The zookeepers strive to provide visitors with a high-quality, informative experience and regard these animal interactions as “Edutainment” not entertainment. Yes, the zoo is fun, exciting and colorful! But the zookeepers hope that visitors will walk away with the same sense of awe, wonder and informed responsibility that they, themselves, have working amongst these amazing creatures every day.
The zoo has Ambassador programs. They have a special children’s area where kids can bring a swimsuit, enjoy a splash zone, swim in a very shallow river (right across from the Meerkats watching them as they swim!) and attend a butterfly house exhibit. The zoo also has seasonal programs, including a three-tier Valentine’s dinner where couples in-love attend a fancy dinner, singles looking for love attend another event at the same time, and those who are single but whose ex did them wrong have the opportunity to commemorate a cockroach and the zoo will name it in the ex’s “honor” and feed it to their animals!
What I love most about this zoo is their vision, creativity and the amazing staff who bring these dreams to life. Zoo visitors can even feed the giraffes, give nectar to colorful birds, interact with kangaroos and visit flamingos! San Antonio Zoo is privately funded. It is a great example of private enterprise at its best.
San Antonio, Texas
San Antonio, Texas is truly one of the “best of the best” destinations in Texas for the Winter holidays. Whether you visit during Thanksgiving, Christmas, the Winter Months, or any time of year, you will have a wonderful time in this vibrant city full of rich culture and heritage and great people!