San Antonio special. In which I finally have enough dishes to feed the neighborhood.

I know, I'm still supposed to (metaphorically) be in Hawaii, but my collector's gaze couldn't resist this mid-week special edition.

With thanks to the brilliant Helen Fielding's equally brilliant Bridget Jones for the cute colloquialism, Mari and I thoroughly enjoyed a "mini-break" this past weekend in San Antonio, Texas. While I haven't worked myself up to a San Antonio blog series quite yet, San Antonio has long been a favorite city, since first exploration in December of 1989, a few months after I followed Mari to my new home state and our forever home in McAllen about 230 miles south of the Alamo.

Numerous road trips with students to speech and debate tournaments all around the River City for seven years in the 1990s emblazoned San Antonio on my travel radar and helped me become familiar with and comfortable driving the environs of the historic 287-year-old municipality. Traveling with my hard-working (and award winning!) loquacious teen lot forced me to discover (mostly) convenient and restorative casual places to dine with my students and fellow chaperone (Mari would regularly volunteer as said responsible female). I invariably reminisce over former students when visiting San Antonio, even when it comes to such a simple memory trigger as late night tacos or Rudy's atomic burger (with atomic fries, of course) but especially the queso flameado at Mi Tierra Cafe in Market Square which was conveniently open round-the-clock for our Friday-going-on-Saturday midnight dinners.

Melty-cheese-filled daydreams aside, when the opportunity recently arose for a getaway weekend to revisit one of Mari's and my treasured musical favorites (K. D. Lang) at one of our favorite historic venues (The Majestic Theatre), we excitedly planned a short weekend visit, complete with revisits to a few of our local favorites to round out our mini-break.

It was after we had enjoyed some memory-inducing tacos that my unintentionally accidental wrong turn out of the parking lot (fueled by said temptalicious tacos) led to a fortuitous driving correction past a new-to-us charity shop in the northeastern Lincoln Heights neighborhood of San Antonio.

When it comes to fate (and wrong turns), there are no accidents.

The Green Door Thrift Shop is across from the HEB plaza where Nacogdoches Road ends on East Basse (just up the hill from The Quarry). You'll need to plan your visit around the shop's limited hours (Tuesday through Saturday 10 AM - 1 PM), but plan you must. About 20 minutes into my collector's pan and scan, my radar blipped its blippiest blip as I beelined towards the set of dishes pictured above (now safely stacked on our kitchen island).

I think you already know I'm a fiend for dishes, but when I turned over a few of the plates and bowls and spied with my little contact-lensed eye the markings here, I knew I would soon be (happily) struggling to fit these Royal Doulton into our kitchen storage.

The price tag confused me a bit because the system at Green Door was unfamiliar to me and there were three different prices on the tag. I preferred the lowest price, of course, so I grabbed a two-handled bone china soup bowl as a declaration of future ownership and brought it and the tag up to the register at the front of the store for clarification.

I glanced briefly around for Mari, but nothing she could have done would have stopped me at this point, as often happens when my collector's gaze has taken over.

As was explained to me by the store volunteer, each of the three decreasing prices on the tag bore a date and after each of those dates had presented itself on a calendar, then that price would be in effect until the next date (about a month into the future).

My glorious English find had reached the end of times!

It was 75% off that fine post-concert Saturday.

It is a great system followed by the volunteers at the Green Door that ensures timely sales and fairly quick inventory turnaround. The two successive half-life discounts worked in my favor that day. For the entire scalloped-edge lot, I paid what I would have (and have) paid for a single saucered teacup at an antiques store.

Thank you for being polite and not asking.

Not only was I thrilled with my new old treasures (the pattern was produced throughout the 1950s and 1960s), but I was happy to become a supporter of a well-established local charity. Please be sure to visit the shop site and visit the shop itself when you are in San Antonio. The website provides information about donating, consigning, and volunteering, as well as a bit of the shop's sixty-plus year history.

sites.google.com/site/greendoorthriftshop/home

In the meantime, we'll be returning to our regularly scheduled Sunday series.
Aloha until then.