The Texas road trip round-up

Texas is a large state, so it took some time to get through it. On top of that, my stay in Texas felt a bit longer because, not only did I stay for 11 days in Dal­las (which is longer than the usual 6-7 maximum days that I spend in each major city), but I also flew to Seattle for a week and flew back to Dallas to con­tin­ue my road trip.

I did a lot in Texas, but not all my activities warranted their own blog post, so I decided to do a Texas round-up with all the miscellaneous photographs I have that I want to share.

My first entry into Texas was when I was visiting Texarkana, a city that straddles both Arkansas and Texas. From there, I drove to Coppell, a northern sub­urb of the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex. My hotel of choice was the Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott Dallas DFW Airport North/Coppell Grape­vine, a nice, clean, modern, straightforward, newly-constructed hotel. As a reminder, I’m a big fan of barebones hotels like this because it gives me eve­ry­thing I need and nothing I don’t need.

Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott Dallas DFW Airport North/Coppell Grapevine

Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott Dallas DFW Airport North/Coppell Grapevine

A few days after arriving in Dallas, I met up with my friend and former assistant Monica and her newly-engaged fiancé for some all-you-can-eat Korean barbecue. I forgot to take a photo of the actual meat that we cooked, so instead, here is a photo of the aftermath of our meal.

The aftermath of all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ

When Monica and I toured Dallas, we each purchased a CityPASS and went to four tourist at­tractions included in the bundle price. The first two at­trac­tions we went to, I already blogged about—the Dallas Zoo and Reunion Tower. The third place we visited was the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, often referred to as the John F. Kennedy Museum.

The JFK Museum wasn’t exactly the best museum I’ve ever been to, but there’s only so much that you can put in a museum about a single president. It was a lot more crowded than I expected (which was probably the case because we had to go on a weekend, because Monica works traditional hours and weekdays), so the first floor ended up being very cramped. What made it worse was that almost the entire first floor composed of big text-heavy posters and normal television-style videos, so people were crowded around and not really moving.

It ended up getting better once you got to the seventh floor, and it felt much more like an actual museum there—there were artifacts from the time period of JFK’s as­sas­si­na­tion, and there was a window where you could look out to see from where precisely Lee Harvey Oswald carried out the as­sas­si­na­tion. I took a photograph of it.

Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza

That’s not the photograph. After looking at my camera roll, Monica proudly declared to me that I had taken a photo of the wrong street, and that she had “saved my blog from doom” from my mistake. … Here’s the actual street—the location where JFK was shot is marked on the street with a white X.

Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza

Our fourth and final tourist activity of our CityPASS was the Perot Museum of Nature and Science. This museum was a mixture of a ton of different things all smashed into one museum; I actually think that this would be a great place for children to learn a fairly broad overview of a lot of scientific top­ics.

Perot Museum of Nature and Science

Perot Museum of Nature and Science

There was a tech area near the end of the museum with a lot of hands-on experiments and exhibits. I don’t really ever take selfies, so when I do end up with a picture of myself, I like to share it; here I am in front of a projector tracking software exhibit thing that took your face and replaced it with a 3D mod­el. It seems like it didn’t recognize me because I had a black face covering on (as was required by the museum due to the pandemic) and my camera was in front of my face, but it recognized Monica.

Perot Museum of Nature and Science

After my trip to Seattle, I flew back to Dallas–Fort Worth, then drove to Decatur after I landed to get a little bit closer to my next destination, Amarillo, so I could break up the monotony of the drive the following day.

It’s a meme at this point that every Texan drives a large pickup truck. When I arrived in Decatur, I noticed that there were a lot of pickup trucks in the parking lot—more than there were any other kind of vehicle combined. In order to capture this meme moment, I snapped a photo from my hotel room window after checking in. Yes, my truck was indeed the smallest one in the lot.

Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott Decatur at Decatur Conference Center

Next up was Amarillo. This was an interesting hotel experience—I booked a room at the Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott Amarillo Central, but ap­par­ent­ly this hotel is connected to and within the same building as the Four Points by Sheraton Amarillo Central. I’m guessing that the Fairfield Inn part was still “under construction,” in the sense that the rooms were ready, but the management of that side of the building hadn’t been staffed up yet, so the Four Points was overseeing the entire building.

I also noticed that this design and color scheme of Fairfield Inn wasn’t one that I had ever seen before. I’m curious to find out whether this is the new look of all the next-generation Fairfield Inns (as opposed to the blue carpet, black desk, and green chair look that you see above in the Dallas pho­to­graph), or if this one was just unique because it was attached to a Four Points.

(And in case you’re curious, no, I wasn’t traveling with anyone in Amarillo—I just had a room with two beds because the rate for this was cheaper than the rate for a single king bed.)

Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott Amarillo Central

Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott Amarillo Central

Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott Amarillo Central

And after a few days in Amarillo (which I mostly used just to exercise in the gym, catch up on work, and relax), I headed out of Texas and into New Mex­i­co. I missed the moment when my truck hit 30,000 miles on the odometer, but I noticed it in time to catch a photo at 30,033 miles.

Hitting 30,000 miles on my GMC Canyon

Next up, Albuquerque.

 

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