Seguin meetup

Peter's next 3 day weekend is Labor Day which is Sep 5-7.  We should plan this now because tickets will be hard to get later.  Since Peter has the least flexibility, he should choose his tickets first.  I suggest Southwest leaving Sep 5 at 12:45pm arriving in San Antonio at 5:25 and returning Sep 7 at 8:00 pm.  The trip there is on shabbat, but I don't see any way around this.  This would give Peter one full day (Sunday) to look around.  Peter, what do you think?

yeah, seems like the only choice. should I go ahead and buy tickets now?

Peter wrote

yeah, seems like the only choice. should I go ahead and buy tickets now?

No, let's confirm with Will and Drealm first.

So Will and Drealm, are you available that weekend?

I'm available from 9/5 - 9/7. Will let me know if we have anything going on at this time?

But if there's an option I would prefer to just fly out on Friday 9/4 instead of Saturday 9/5. I usually work from home on Fridays anyways so I can easily fly out before Sabbath.

okay guys, tickets there and back bought.

I'm looking at flights out of Oakland for Friday 9/4. The most reasonable departing flight out of Oakland for Southwest departs at 8:20am and arrives in San Antonio at 3:05pm. It's also the cheapest and shortest travel time. Is 3pm a good arrival time Will, fschmidt?

For return flight I can pick a late one if you guys want. The last available return flight departs at 8:00pm.

fschmidt do you already know a hotel in the area?

I am thinking of going with my family so that my kids can also see the area.  Is that okay?  If yes, I would drive there on Thursday and return on Tuesday.

My wife stayed at the Holiday Inn in Seguin and she says it's fine.

Fine with me.

Fine with me too.

I booked my flights. I'll arrive Tuesday 9/4 at 3:00pm and leave Mon 9/7 at 7:25pm.

I booked a room in Holiday Inn in Seguin from 9/4 to 9/7.

Frank, since you will be driving, would you picking us up or get us to airport?

I think we will need 2 cars, so someone can rent one at the airport.  I can meet people at the airport.

We discussed non-negotiable criteria. Mine was no more than 2hr away from a "Whole Foods" store. I've thought about this more and I think I'm leaning more towards 1 hour instead of 2. We can discuss this but my reasoning is that at 2 hours driving some foods will spoil in a car. This can be combatted with a cooler but it's not ideal. 4 hours round trip is also quite tedious for just going grocery shopping, even if it's once every 2 weeks.

Now I need to know how an hour's distance translates to miles. This depends on what roads are used and traffic conditions. Any suggestions welcome here. For a starting point I will say 60 miles.

I located 5 Whole Foods stores. 2 are in San Antonio and 3 are in Austin. These are the addresses:

- Alamo Quarry Market, 255 E Basse Rd #130 San Antonio, TX
- Vineyard Shopping Center, 18403 Blanco Rd San Antonio, TX
- 525 N Lamar Blvd Austin, TX
- 11920 Domain Dr Austin, TX
- Gateway Shopping Center, 9607 Research Blvd Austin, TX

On these five locations I created a pin in google maps pro. I then used the circle function to draw a 60 mile radius from each point. This gives us a starting point to know what counties to look in and which ones are too far away.

I count 26 counties where a county is roughly 50% or more within the circles.

This results in this map:



As a point of reference:

Bexer County = San Antonio
Guadalupe County = Seguin
Travis County = Austin

All the counties shaded in black fall outside having 50% or more territory within 60 mile radiuses of whole foods.

I'm now using zillow to further explore search. What I do is I go to Zillow and type in a county name and TX. This gives me an outline of the county:



There doesn't seem to be a good trick for locating water lots by text. You can scroll around the map and find them but if you enter "water" under the "more" drop down it excludes some near water, it's crude.

Right now I'm applying two filters:

- I'm only checking "Lots/land" under home type.
- Under "More" I'm specifying minimum lot size as "435,600" square feet (10 acres).

I would like to continue narrowing the search and potentially come up with a list of places to visit. Any thoughts/suggestions?

One thing we should find out is where "city" building regulations end. For example maybe all of Bexar county has more stringent building codes that others further away from city centers.

I agree with your distance requirement.

In Texas, cities (incorporated areas) have zoning power but counties do not.  Americans, being evil morons, implement zoning wherever they can.  So just stay away from incorporated cities and towns.

I looked through all of the 26 counties above. Most are bad in the sense that they don't have large bodies of water.

I used this criteria on Zillow:

- Listing Type: For Sale
- Home Type: Lots/Land
- More: Lot Size (sqft) Min: 435,600

I found these lots:

- 2521 County Rd # 104, Castell, TX 76831
- 431 Cimarron Ranch Rd, Marble Falls, TX 78654
- 12620 Pleasanton Rd, San Antonio, TX 78221
- 00000011 Selma Hughes, Austin, TX 78732
- 19813/17 Lakehurst Loop, Spicewood, TX 78669
- 1802 Sisterdale Rd, Boerne, TX 78006
- 5809 W Hwy 290, Dripping Springs, TX 78620

You can look at these on Zillow or Google Earth by copying and pasting the full address into search box. They all have water. One of them is outside the 60 mile radius but I included it anyways since it's not that far outside and I couldn't find many lots with water.

I used the google person view and didn't find it too helpful. From what I do see the counties east of San Antonio look a bit more green than the southern ones. The western counties look dryer in some areas than both the east and south. There are also big hills in the west. However some street views show the west to be dry in one view but then green if you advance a couple screens forward with arrow button. This makes it difficult to know which areas are green or dry. For this reason I would probably like to visit the areas east, south and west of San Antonio.

I have a suggested route, but I'm open to other options. I think Peter mentioned some place he wanted to go to but I don't remember where. My suggested route is we explore the area outside San Antonio and Austin in a clockwise circle starting with going south under San Antonio. I'm most interested in Guadalupe, Wilson, Atascosa, Frio counties. We can then circle up north/west through hill country and over Austin.

My suggested route starts as follows:

1. From hotel go east along Guadalupe River in Guadalupe county.

2. Go south towards the town Nixon.

3. Go south/west towards the towns Stockdale, Floresville, Pleasanton, Jourdanton

4. Go north/west towards the towns Devine, Hondo.

5. Go north towards the town Bandera, Mendina, Kerrvile. This will all be hill country.

6. Go north/east towards Fredericksburg, Johnson City.

7. Go north towards Marble falls. Right after Johnson City we will cross River Pi. Before Marble Falls we will cross Lake Marble Falls.

8. Go west towards the town Kingsland. This will give us a partial view of lake Lyndon B Johnson and the river that connects to it.

9. Go north towards Buchanan Lake. While driving towards Buchanan Lake we'll see the river that connects to it.

10. Go West towards the town Burnet.

11. Go north towards the town Lampasas.

12. Go west towards still House Hollow Lake. There is a large suburb type thing called Killeen that looks really hideous. I think we can driver just south of it to avoid it.

13. Go north towards the town Belton.

14. Go south/west towards the towns Holland, Bartlett, Granger.

15. Go east towards Granger Lake.

16. Go south towards the towns Taylor, Elgin, Bastrop.

17. Go south/west towards San Marcos.

18. Go east along the San Marcos river till we reach the city Luling.

19. Return to hotel by going south/west.

Map:

green = 10mile radius around seguine
blue = route
red = 60 mile radius around whole foods(s)

Hotel has a pin within green to show where it is.



Thoughts?

This is basically covering everything including places that are probably too far (like Fredericksburg).  So my suggestion is to make a smaller circle around San Antonio like this:

Seguin, Stockdale, Floresville, Pleasanton, Jourdanton, Devine, Hondo, Bandera, Mendina, Kerrvile, Boerne, Canyon Lake, New Braunfels, McQueeney, Seguin

After this circle, we will know the kind of terrain we don't like and we don't need to see the same kind of terrain around Austin.  So now from Seguin:

Seguin, San Antonio Whole Foods, Austin, whatever around Austin interests us, then back to Seguin

I don't recommend anywhere on 35 around Austin because it is too built up with too much traffic.  So we would either see east or west of Austin depending on what we like around San Antonio.

This sounds like a good basic route to me. As we are driving we can also use GPS to take different roads depending on what looks most interesting.