• Today was another big schedule of dog showing, so in the interests of supporting the exhibitors I quickly and selflessly left the show to allow more room for spectators. One of my very few faults is that my body is too frail to support the size of my giant heart.
• Now that I’d freed up my spectator position for orphaned children or whatever, I needed to find something else to do. That something came in the form of a golf buggy, and the streets of Dallas. For a small(* – not actually small ) fee, I got a guided tour on the back of a glorified golf buggy, sans anything to do with golf. In the spirit of Good Old Boost Cruising Days, we cut some fat laps through the Dallas city centre at a top speed of 12mph, much to the delight of other road users.
• Dallas is a very interesting mix of old and new building styles, and more Mason cubby houses than you can poke a stick at. I don’t really know what the Masons actually do aside from having buildings you’re not allowed to go in to, but The Simpsons episode about them sure makes it hard to take them seriously. Lots of drinking from goblets and naked initiation ceremonies I assume.
• The Pegasus makes a heap of appearances in any sort of advertising in Dallas. From official street signs to coffee shops, it’s everywhere. As far as I can tell it’s because of an oil company that had it as their logo on the tallest building in the city for a long time? That OG sign has since been cleaned up and is now outside the Omni Hotel (owned by a famous(?) NFL sports guy said the tour guide, but Wiki says it’s owned by the city so yeah pretty glad I spent the bucks for that accurate and factual local knowledge). There’s now another Pegasus on top of the building that’s better somehow. Not much of an origin story, but there is is.
• We visited the Farmers Market, which is where farmers used to sell produce direct to the locals from 3 big sheds. There is now just 1 big shed, with the other 2 being sold and developed as units and chain stores. Pumpkins featured heavily in the remaining shed.
• We also visited the spot where JFK was assassinated, which is crazy morbid. There’s marks on the road where he was shot, and where he died so you can take a selfie at the exact spot someone famous as shot I guess? There were two people selling conspiracy books about the assassination in Dealey Plaza while we were there. I didn’t pay enough attention to see if they were competing theories or not…. someone more interested in confrontation than I could probably have a great day out getting the crazies riled up against each other if they were though.
• I couldn’t help myself and after the golf buggy tour ended I went back to the Sixth Floor Museum which is housed inside the Texas Book Depository where Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F Kennedy from the sixth floor window. You actually get to go to the sixth floor where they’ve recreated the “sniper nest” of boxes as it was found by police. Interesting, but so morbid.
• After the Sixth Floor Museum, Google said there was a giant eyeball nearby. Given my love of Big Things™, I headed off that way. Unfortunately some dingaling had gone and erected a giant gazebo right in front of the thing. I mean it’s still pretty big I guess, but I wanted to position myself so it hilariously looked like a normal sized eye
• I still had an hour or so to kill, so I wandered over to the Crow Museum Of Asian Art. This is a totally free gallery which at the time was full of Japanese and Chinese art. Quite an interesting area, and some of the stuff was crazy old. I’m not great at art so maybe I was missing something, but it seemed crazy that stuff from decades BCE looked almost identical to stuff made in the 19th century. Not many technological advances going on in the clay pot industry I guess? Slipped them some bucks to say thanks, then it was back to the dog show.
• Uber ride back to Mesquite was very entertaining because of the dude being the classic African American who loves their creole cooking and getting all passionate about it. I mentioned my love of skin-on salmon and he was off, giving me so many pro tips on spices and what have you that I literally ended up taking notes. 5 stars and a tip for that man.
• Off to dinner at another steakhouse with beagle pals, where we found more Canadians to discuss how dumb American bank notes are; all made of nappies and newspaper and same-same looking compared to our glorious superior polymer bank notes in all the colours of the rainbow. Our arguments were somewhat offset by the fact we’re both at like 60c to the US dollar but I guess that’s the price you pay to be able to tell the value of notes apart at a distance. Thanks to Lindsay for shouting us a feed! I’ve never eaten so much lobster and caviar, nor drunk so many cocktails as I did once I found out someone else was paying.
• Back to the hotel for some more beagle pats before bed time. Tomorrow is domestic flight day! Time to test my hotel pillow compression theory out and get all our trinkets stuffed in to our bags.
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