Dallas and Fort Worth along with the intervening and surrounding communities make up one megolopolis rather similar to Baltimore and Washington. Trying to keep a little distance from dad while still staying accessible we were here for a little over two months with frequent trips to Shreveport, Louisiana on the side. Our visits to the Fort Worth Botanical Garden and Fort Worth Japanese Garden I just added to the pages covering our 2007 visits. Other major attractions like Fort Worth Zoo, the Dallas World Aquarium, and the Nasher Sculpture Center are on these separate new pages. For the rest I'll try to keep each area together more or less in a block but this is likely to be the longest page on the site.
Arlington, Texas gave us a central location almost exactly between Dallas and Fort Worth right along US-360 just north of I-30. We had a special from Extended Stay America with a rather large discount for staying over 60 days. All total with the long term rate and the discount we ended up about $18 a day including all utilities. One major effort at this time was editing over 1,500 of dad's slides which my sister and I had scanned, identifying as many as possible, and organizing them into an electronic picture frame for dad's birthday so he could actually enjoy them. He was starting to develop severe dementia so while he could not help with the slides he could still enjoy seeing the many photos he took over his lifetime.
Another great deal was the Trinity Railway Express. The DFW Airport station was only about five miles up US-360 with free parking. At that time seniors over 65 could get a day pass allowing unlimited travel including busses in Dallas for about $1.75. They have now bumped the fare to $2.50 but it's still a great deal. Fort Worth did not accept the rail pass on their buses which was a slight additional hassle but no big deal. The connections were normally bad enough we just drove to things in the Fort Worth area.
Right across the street from the Nasher Sculpture Center is the Crow Museum of Asian Art with this really neat fountain entrance. Like most museums they don't like you to take pictures but I snuck this one of the prayer house built inside. Just down the street was this horse sculpture to who knows what.
This rather nice mural celebrating their conductor for the Dallas Ballet is on the side of a high rise parking garage. On Saturday I was lucky and did not have any cars parked right in front of it like usual. The Dallas skyline picture was taken from this same general area before we headed home.
It turned out to be about 6 weeks before we got back to downtown Dallas and just wander around. Johnny Cash wanted one long and black but we found this white one out behind the Dallas World Aquarium that is covered on this other page, Unfortunately Reunion Tower here in the background was closed for renovation and has reopened at substantially higher prices for the observations deck.
I have no clue the meaning of the red sculpture other than being a red sculpture. The entry way here leads to a strip mall thing with a lot of little shops. The big red building is called the Old Red Court House. This is where President Kennedy was shot and the block across the street is the Kennedy memorial.
Diagonally across the street is Founders Plaza containing what is claimed to be the first house built in what is now the city. The plaza also has one of the variable fountains for the kids to play.
While the entry to the shopping area is rather sedate the entry to the nightclub strip has this Texas sized party gator. The clubs all face a rather small alleyway with tributes to mostly country western singers like the hat on the fiddle is a monument to Bob Wells.
By getting off the Trinity Railway Express at Union Station we could transfer to the DART light rail to Plano, Texas in northeast Dallas County which had this rather nice horse sculpture at the station.
Just across the parking lot is Haggard Park which gave us a very nice place to take a break after exploring some of the stores in the area. We really don't need anything so we mostly just wander and enjoy the scenery.
Before our train trip we had driven to the Arbor Hills Nature Preserve in western Plano to see another display of wild flowers and use the observation deck to look over the countryside which leads rather naturally into some the parks we enjoyed and we tried to get to a lot. In the overview Dallas is barely visible on the left side of the horizon indicating the huge size of this area.
The River Legacy Park on the north side of Arlington, Texas along the Trinity River was one of our favorites for several reasons.
First obviously it was close to where we were staying in Arlington, parking was always available, and it was near the middle of a great paved bike trail. In 2017 they were only claiming 8 miles of paved trail but I think at that time it connected to other sections for a total of 21 miles and we rode it all. Not all at once but covered it all.
Another of our favorites although a longer drive was the Cedar Ridge Preserve in Southwest Dallas with this last picture of Joe Pool Lake to the west of the preserve. By our last visit in June it was starting to get rather hot in the afternoon but we wanted to visit the cattail pond which is only about a mile from the top of the ridge but also about 200 feet down over decent but unpaved trails. After getting all the way to the pond I discovered that I had inadvertently left the camera turned on and the battery was dead so I can't show any pictures of this really nice part of the park. While I like to leave with pictures this time we only ended up with memories.
The Flower Mound is one of the best known and talked about features in the area and probably the most difficult to find any documentation. This little 12 acre bump rises 50 feet above the prarrie and is covered with wonderful wild flowers in the spring. Why the hill and why the profusion of wild flowers seems to remain a mystery but the town of Flower Mound surrounds and protects it. Throughout Texas we see huge flocks of these grackles. Especially in the evening they fill the sky, and the parking lot, and the trees, and hop all over the cars, and obviously leave droppings on everything.
We also checked out the federal campground at Benbrook Lake on the southwestern corner of Fort Worth. The facilities are rather nice and we will be staying here on a future visit. Like most of the area all the open areas are covered in lovely wild flowers. The trail system is not the greatest but there is not a lot of traffic so the roads suffice.
Getting back more into civilization the town of Las Colinas is a totally artificial manufactured community carved out of the marsh around some of the oxbow lakes left from changes in the Trinity River northwest of Dallas. The lakes have been confined with retaining walls and hope you don't fall in because I could not find any place to really get out.
Las Colinas is primarily noted for yuppy housing and the mustang fountain that shows the polar opposite characteristics of the town itself. So at this point I'll just quit having covered just a few of the many locations in this megolopolis. I'm sure it would take years to really show all the thing there are to see, sort of like Texas itself.