Doing Dallas In A Day

As I mentioned in a blog post last week, my sister Susan and I had a hell of a time getting back to Denver from Rome.  We wound up having to spend an entire day in Dallas, Texas.  Mark Twain once famously said that if he owned both Texas and Hell, he would live in Hell and rent out Texas, and I think he had Dallas in mind when he said it.  In any case, Dallas does have a good public transportation system.  We took a shuttle back to the airport from our hotel, checked our bags for the 10:30 P.M. flight, and then headed downtown on their light rail train.

Before we knew it, we were standing in Dealey Plazza, where John F. Kennedy was assassinated back in 1963, a day I still vividly remember. I took a look at the grassy knoll, and was approached was a strange guy carrying JFK memorabilia and a duplicate of the camera Zapruder  used to record the murder, who I think wanted me to hire him for a tour.  I did not intend to do that unless he could produce a second shooter in the flesh.  In any case, I took the photograph on the right of my sister Susan, no doubt calling me to come look at the Texas Book Depository (seen in the background of the photo), where Lee Harvey Oswald fired the fatal shots.  We then walked around downtown Dallas for a while, and found it to be ugly as hell. Surprise!

I went into a tourist office to get a map of the area, and found that the Dallas Arboretum was reachable by public transportation. We headed off there by light rail, only to find that the tourist map was not to scale, and we could not walk to the arboretum on foot.  A very kind woman called the transit line and told us what bus to take, and the driver of that bus told us what bus to transfer to in order to get to the arboretum.  Amazingly enough, it was all worth it, for the Dallas Arboretum is absolutely beautiful.  My sister Susan - who is a fanatical gardener - told me that it was the most beautiful garden she has ever seen.  We had lunch there, and took the bus right in front of the garden back downtown, where we took the train back to the airport and our flight home.  Downtown Dallas might be ugly as sin (and probably most of Texas as well), but they sure know how to put together a garden.