Sometimes you just have to take an adventure when you have the chance – you have to make time for it quickly and jump on it. That was absolutely the case last week. I had travelled to the Dallas area for work (getting there was an adventure on it’s own), and one of my co-workers pointed out that we had the chance to visit a remarkable place while we were in the area.
First, the journey. There is no doubt that the Lower Mainland of BC is never ready for any level of snowfall. Earlier this month, we got a skiff of snow starting shortly after 3pm, and everyone started to pack up for the day. When I say a skiff, in any other part of Canada, it would have been dealt with by using a broom, as the shovel would have been overkill. Here, that meant I didn’t get home that night until 8pm. And that was for half a centimeter of snow. This is why everyone left early, because half a centimeter of snow is “snowmaggedon” here.
The day we were flying out was truly snowmaggedon, however, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this much snow in Vancouver proper, and I can’t find a good estimate, but I would have to say we had a solid 30 cm. It made progress to the airport slow, with reports that airlines in Canada were cancelling flights outright. All props to American Airlines though (see what I did there?), as we got out about 12 minutes after our scheduled time. The big delay was an unavoidable wait for de-icing, but we landed in reasonable time to find dinner near our hotel.
Two days later, it was just one co-worker and I, and we had a few things to wrap up which would take most of a morning. Completing them, we walked around downtown Fort Worth – we were staying by Sundance Square – because the architecture was truly amazing, and I wanted to capture some of it. Fort Worth is an Art Deco haven, with glorious buildings that have been saved, in whole or in part, from destruction – unlike Vancouver’s rip and tear attitude that brings down glorious old buildings. Some have saved only the facade, but some have saved the entire building, retaining the beauty of this architectural period.
My coworker also had a great idea. It was unbelievably cold (-12C with the wind chill) and so we decided to warm up indoors by grabbing a bite. One of the things we saw in Fort Worth was a John F. Kennedy memorial. I didn’t know, but he had visited and spoken to the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce the day he was shot. After lunch at a suitably kitschy barbeque restaurant with animal heads on the walls, we followed through on my friend’s plan, and went to Dealey Plaza en route to the airport. I have no idea if I will ever be back to Dallas, so his idea was brilliant.
I don’t know what I expected. I didn’t expect a museum, but it’s there, and it’s really well done. You can go through at your own pace and we did (read: quickly), but if you want to learn about his election campaign, that’s all there too. There is a lot to learn about the shooting, and you can see the windows that Oswald used. There are 3D video recreations of the shooting that scroll on TVs, there’s the model of the shooting that you can see in the photos below, and then you can walk to the grassy knoll, and see the arrow-straight, well-maintained fence.
Sometimes you stumble on adventure. Be sure to take it, as you never know if you will ever be there again.
