Dallas, JFK & the Southfork Ranch

Saturday 3.5.2014

Clear sky again and very chilly temperatures. Can't go out in the morning without a jacket. But it quickly warms up and we leave in a good mood, leaving this motel behind with its truck drivers and cockroaches.

In Dallas we want to have breakfast and the Farmers Market is supposed to be good. However, we are there at 9:00 am and it doesn't open until 10:00 am. Apart from some nice flower stands and fruits and vegetables, there is nothing to get here.

The hall with the food stands is still closed for another hour. So we drive to downtown where the city is completely deserted. It's Saturday and people would go shopping now where we're from! Even fast food restaurants and diners are closed.

People, cars - hardly anything to see. Shortly before 10:00 am we park at the JFK Museum and walk three blocks back and left into the historic district. Finally, we find a nice breakfast spot at "Ellie's", crowded but luckily we sit outside in the sun and enjoy nice service and a good breakfast.

Before we go to the JFK Museum, we briefly stop by the Old Red Museum and the JFK Memorial. In the Old Red Museum is the tourist information and we pick up some brochures.

The JFK Museum is the house (former textbook publishing house) where Kennedy was shot. Directly below is the street where it happened. A white cross marks the spot. Even today, this street is completely normal and tourists still take photos in the middle of the road.

The entrance to the museum is only possible in small groups, so we have to wait 30 minutes until we can buy a ticket. It's already after 12:00 pm. We get an audio set and both the German explanations and the exhibition are absolutely great! Diagrams, documents, and films cover the preparation of JFK's visit, the problems his policies generated at the time, the daily routine, and the aftermath of the assassination - up to the recent past. It consciously leaves open whether Lee Harvey Oswald was the shooter or whether there was a conspiracy of intelligence agencies behind it. We are thrilled and touched and after almost two hours, we are outside again. Photos were not allowed inside.

On Elm Street, where the white crosses mark the first shots and the fatal shot on JFK, the tourist magnets are still here. It is strange to want to be photographed at such a point, just as incomprehensible as the American who climbs the JFK Memorial with a plastic bag and a banana peel in his hand.

If I don't have anything to do with JFK, I'll skip the visit here. But such behavior is really strange.

In the afternoon, we have something lighter - we visit the Southfork Ranch, which was the backdrop for the globally known series 'Dallas', which particularly shaped Tuesday evenings in Germany at the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s. 'No Tuesday without Dallas' was a slogan of the time. The house is quite small, surprisingly small.

We wander around the property, watch a film-ready afternoon party through a hedge, fulfilling pretty much every cliché we associate with Bobby and J.R. Ewing, Miss Ellie, and the others.

We drive out of Dallas and head southeast. We think we will find something in Gun Barrel City. This is a place located on a large reservoir, but every hotel here is really full. In addition, there are not really many motels or hotels, and the ones that exist are full or don't have suitable rooms available or want $140 plus tax. We drive back to the highway and fortunately find a Quality Inn & Suites where we get a huge room with gigantic beds for $114 including breakfast.

There is still 1 bottle of beer for two, because the amount of the bottle is so large that the thick one is enough for two.

We are in bed around midnight.