San Antonio is big. Your dating radius isn't.

Locals half-joke that this is the default answer, and the reason is practical: there is no gate and no ticket on the old brewery grounds, so a first date can start at the weekend market, move to a patio, and end on the lawn without anyone committing to a two-hour dinner. Budget extra time for the garages on a weekend.

Easy to leave early and easy to stretch out, which is what you want when neither of you knows how the evening will go.

Four months of the year, outdoor plans here are a gamble, which is why this one keeps coming up: it sits down inside an old limestone quarry, so shade and running water make it bearable when everything above ground is not. Admission is free, and the koi ponds and stone bridges keep handing you something to react to.

Summer visits work best early in the day, and the loop is short enough to pair with the rest of Brackenridge Park.

Ask around and this is the museum people call the romantic one. The old mansion gives you galleries when the air conditioning is the point, and twenty-five acres of courtyards, ponds and sculpture when it isn't. It also sits at the north end of the Broadway corridor, so for anyone living up near 281 it is the rare cultural stop that isn't a drive downtown.

One of the few options here that works in a brutal August as well as a mild spring, since the galleries are cool and the grounds are not the only draw.

The useful thing about SAMA is what surrounds it. You can walk in along the river from Pearl, spend an hour inside the old Lone Star brewery buildings, then sit down at a table by the water, and the whole sequence needs no planning. For anyone in Southtown it is a ride up the greenway rather than a drive.

Best used as the middle of a longer afternoon rather than the whole plan, since the riverside walk on either side is half the appeal.

Nearly all of this city's culture is stacked between downtown and Broadway, which leaves the South Side driving north for every plan. The missions are the exception. A loop of the walled courtyard, the granary and the 1775 rose window runs about half an hour, long enough to get somewhere in a conversation, short enough that a slow start is not fatal, and there is no admission.

Entirely outdoors, so October through April is the honest window; it is still a working parish, so keep the visit respectful.

Say River Walk and most people picture the downtown loop full of visitors. This is the other one, the northern extension, where locals walk on a Saturday morning and watch boats work through the lock. It links Pearl to downtown on foot, a rare thing in a city where almost nothing connects without a car.

Flat, paved and continuous the whole way, so you can walk as far as the conversation lasts and turn back whenever.

There are no hills here and no coastline, so the only way to see how far this place actually stretches is to go up. From the deck you can point out each other's side of town, which hands a first conversation an easy starting point, and the park below has shaded walkways for whatever comes after.

Go late in the day; there is an indoor level too, so heat or rain does not cancel the plan.

Ernst Altgelt built the first house here in 1866, and the streets have stayed short, shaded and walkable ever since, which is why dinner in Southtown so often turns into a lap through the neighborhood without anyone planning it. The footbridge at Johnson Street gets you over the river, and Guenther House is an easy daytime stop that asks very little of either of you.

Street parking on these narrow blocks is the part locals warn you about, so arrive early or leave the car in Southtown and walk.

For anyone north of Loop 410, meeting up usually means an hour in the car round trip, and that argument sinks plenty of plans before they start. This one sits on their side of town: seven and a half miles of trail through oak savanna, plus a land bridge carrying wildlife over Wurzbach Parkway that locals will drive out to walk across.

Oak cover helps more than most parks here, though the trails are exposed in stretches; two hours is easy if the two of you keep talking.