Totally Awesome Vacation: Downtown Dallas

Ok, I am sure you are all really bored by these travel logs, but it's better that I post them here rather than share them over the pulpit during testimony meeting - which I am tempted to do since the game was a spiritual experience. :)

We stayed up really late on Saturday night watching the game replays and news on how awesome our team is. Well, mostly on Sam Bradshaw getting hurt, but that meant that they showed clips of the game a lot. In fact, we had slept with SportsCenter on all night and slept through our alarm to start our sightseeing downtown the next morning. Typical me.

We met Jason and Ben at our first stop, which was one of the things that I was really looking forward to seeing in Dallas. For all of my involvement in politics, I knew very little about the JFK assassination and all of the controversy surrounding it. In preparation for this trip, I watched JFK. To get a good idea of at least the conspiracy theories.I am not usually a Dale Gribble kind of girl, but I am now firmly convinced that there were at least two shooters and possibly three teams of two men each. I also think that Lee Harvey Oswald did not work alone and possibly worked for the government. Kendall said that he has a video he from the history channel that disproves this and shows that the magic bullet theory is true. That seems like bull hockey to me, but I'll watch it.

This now fascinates me. When I die, this is going to be the first question I ask when I get up there. Anyway, it was a great museum - tons of information, very respectful and covers all sorts of possible conspiracies. They also had this neat cellphone tour where you call a number and you can walk around and see certain sites and listen to stories and history right there on your cell phone. I thought that was pretty creative. (Below: Grassy Knoll, Book Depository and JFK Memorial - I think it looks like giant Legos.)

The overriding thing that we did all day was read anything we could find about the game. By Sunday, they were starting to focus less on on Bradshaw's injury and more on the Cougars' win. Pat Forde of ESPN has become one of my favorite guys ever. He is a FAN! Thank goodness for blackberries and iPhones! We were desperate for the new poll numbers, I thought we would be #12. It would be a few more days (#9 on 9-09-09!!) before they would come out, but we were going to be the first ones to find out come hell or high water!

Jason and Ben headed off to go to church, because frankly, they are better people than us. For the rest of the afternoon, we saw the rest of downtown Dallas, most of which consisted of Scott and Kendall climbing on things. Pioneer Plaza had a really cool bronze statue display of dozens of cattle and cowboys to celebrate Dallas' American Hero Cowboy Past (please vote on poll on right so I can prove Scott wrong.) I really enjoyed walking through Pioneer Plaza, the statues were really well done and felt like they had a lot of motion.

After Pioneer Plaza, I pretty much quit caring about anything because my brain was melting in my head. IT WAS SO DAMN HOT. I am not sure if I can say this enough. SO HOT! SO VERY VERY HOT. I am not sure how I am going to handle Florida State next year.

Kendall then took us over to Thanks-Giving Park, where we met up with Jason. I thought that the park was a wonderful concept. It was not so much about the holiday, but about the idea of giving thanks and how the simple act of doing that can change the world. It was a wonderful place with bells and artistic structures and a very cool mosaic of a Norman Rockwell painting. Hot, but wonderful.

From here, we went to the Dallas Art District, again the trip consisted mostly of Scott and Kendall climbing on stuff. It was really cool how they've put all of these art collections, museums and theaters all in the same area. They had it well organized and there was a lot to see. We just played around a fountain for about 30 minutes because it was SO HOT.

We were exhausted and crawled to Cracker Barrel for an easy dinner so we could get back to the hotel for more SportsCenter. Kendall asked for a braille Menu (we were REALLY tired); the waitress had no idea what he was talking about and we couldn't stop laughing. Scott and I engaged in a blood battle game of checkers for over 30 minutes until he caved and and let me win - SAD! I wanted to play it out until one of us cried.

It was the last full day in Dallas - such a WONDERFUL trip! The next morning, we slept in, went swimming for a few hours and then headed to the airport. Once we took off, I snapped this picture of Cowboys stadium from the air. So you could get a better idea of how big it really is! A great end to a fantastic trip!