Spanky Branch

After another good sleep (apart from waking with a sore shoulder), Ted and I met the host of the apartment Angel and his dog Coco, whom we fell in love with immediately (Coco, not Angel)! When we came to Dallas, we considered going to the Texas State Fair, but since we've seen it before already, we thought we could use our time to do some more sightseeing instead.

We arranged to meet Monica today, a lady we'd met several years ago at a tango show in Buenos Aires. She suggested we meet halfway at a bakery called Panera Bread, which ended up being quite nice. It was great to meet up with Monica - she had provided us with a lot of useful information when we were researching our trip to Texas which was appreciated.

We headed to a nearby Walmart so Ted could buy some sunglasses before heading to downtown Dallas. I was really hoping to see Dealey Plaza, the place of JFK's assassination in 1963 as we had not seen this on our previous trip to Dallas. Even though the day was very hot, it was a very enjoyable day out. The plaza still looks very similar to how it did back then, and the street was marked with the exact places where JFK had been shot. We could also easily see the famous Book Depository and Grassy Knoll made famous by the investigation.

The Book Depository has now been transformed into a museum which presents not only the assassination from a historical perspective, but also provides information about the conspiracy theories and further investigations. It was presented as an audio tour which I found very interesting, and I also took a lot of photographs of the outside area. For lunch, we used the GPS to find a nearby Cheesecake Factory (Ted's favourite) before going back to relax in our room.

We had arranged to go for dinner with Mike and Marco nearby, which was great since everything was walkable. It was still warm in the evening so we didn't need to dress up. We went to a nearby restaurant but the guys were unable to join us for drinks afterwards as Mike had been called to do a trip tomorrow. Mike was similarly good enough to pay for our dinner which we appreciated greatly.

Ted and I then walked to the nearby venues, which included the Country and Western bar Roundup, complete with line dancing. In comparison with Sydney, it is interesting to see how well organised and popular the venues in Dallas are. There were also so many people out! After several drinks and meeting various locals, we headed back just after midnight.Read more