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Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas (1 - 4 June 2016)

Kristina and I have been living in Austin for five months now and we love it. The lease on our apartment is up in another five months and we need to decide what we're going to do at that point. Our options are: a) keep renting in Austin, 2) buy our first home in Austin, or d) buy our first home somewhere else. The first option is easy and cost effective but we don't want to be renting forever. The second option is somewhat pricey for what we'd like for given the home prices in Austin tend to be higher than elsewhere in Texas, and hence the third option to consider elsewhere. We've already made the decision to stay in Texas, and the only other Texas city that we might consider living in is Dallas. However, I'd never been there to see it for myself and Kristina has spent very little time there. So, for our anniversary and my birthday trip this year, we drove the three hours north to spend a few days scoping out the joint!

Day 1 was spent checking out central Dallas. We parked the car on the edge of downtown and wandered on in.		Nice look and feel about the place, plenty of traffic for me to enjoy on my bike...		...and bike lanes. Excellent! That always earns some brownie points in my book.

There are quite a lot of tall buildings here compared to Austin's smaller downtown, though with all the construction taking place in Austin that will likely change.		This one looks like it would be fun to slide down. Until it wouldn't.		Lots of green space throughout - more brownie points.

Also lots of places to take a nap.		All in all, Dallas has a great downtown core, so we put a nice fat tick in that box.		Be that as it may, every city has its weirdoes, such as this guy wearing shorts on top of his jeans and shouting gibberish as he walked down the street hehe.

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dealey Plaza in the historic West End district of downtown Dallas, and although we didn't come here to do touristy things for a change, I did want to visit this area.

This is the former Texas School Book Depository (now the Dallas County Administration Building). The sixth-story corner window (second from the top) is where employee Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots from a high-powered rifle aimed at Kennedy as his motorcade drove past here. Two of those shots hit Kennedy, the first passing through his neck and throat, and the second hitting the right side of his head which likely killed him instantly.

Dealey Plaza with the Book Depository out of shot to the left. Kennedy's motorcade was moving from left to right, and Kennedy was fatally struck at the extreme-right of this shot. There is an 'X' on the road marking the spot.		This shot was taken adjacent to the point of impact. Note the clear line of sight from the Book Depository's window.
The grassy knoll from where many spectators witnessed the assassination, including at least one man who filmed it - Abraham Zapruder. Zapruder's home-movie camera footage became known as the Zapruder film, and was vital in the subsequent investigations. The video can be seen here.		More than 50 years later, numerous conspiracy theories still exist about what really happened that day, including Oswald not being a lone gunmen. Some have suggested that at least one other shooter was perched adjacent to the grassy knoll behind this wall here, but evidence for this has since been discredited. Oswald denied shooting anybody and claimed to be a patsy, but was himself shot and killed two days later by a local nightclub owner (the strangeness of which also raised suspicions) on live TV while being transferred to county jail. More info here in a write up I did back on the 50th anniversary of the event.
Anyway, from downtown we ventured north, starting with some multi-million-dollar neighborhoods which are pretty damn nice to look at, but somewhat out of our price range. For now ;)
This one is apparently worth $8.5 million, and fairly representative of what's around here. Much further north again we did venture into neighborhoods that were more realistic, but they were miles away and frankly a little boring.		Kristina took me out to dinner for my birthday, and afterwards we went up the 561-foot (171m) Reunion Tower to its revolving restaurant and bar for some drinkies.
Day 2 was a wet and stormy one, and we started it in the northern city of McKinney. It has a cute and historic center surrounded by more nice neighborhoods, but again its miles away from central Dallas which is not ideal. If we're going to move to Dallas, we want to be in Dallas. Still, it was worth a look.
From McKinney we ventured through several more neighborhoods in the east of Dallas, including the city of Rockwall here. Kristina's older brother is relocating here next month for work, and insisted we check it out. Again, very nice, but again, very far away.

Day 3 and we headed west this time, starting with the city of Fort Worth. Everywhere we visited on this trip was either part of Dallas itself or a satellite city making up the so-called Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, which is home to about seven million people. Besides Dallas, Fort Worth is the other major city in the metroplex. It's a lot quieter than Dallas, and really embraces its western heritage and traditional architecture.

Speaking of its western heritage, the Fort Worth Stockyards is a historic district which was once a livestock market dating back to 1866. It's a modern-day, albeit touristy, slice of the west, complete with cowboys and saloons.

During our big USA road trip I mentioned the TV series Prison Break when we visited the filming location of the prison used in season 1. Fast forward to season 3 and the main characters find themselves in prison again thanks to the usual plot twists, but this time the prison was set in Panama. The filming location for the prison was in Fort Worth however.

And this is it, hehe. We broke into the original prison during the road trip, and we broke into this one too hahaha! Despite the watchtower (which I suspect was built for the show and never removed), this was never a prison, but a meat packing plant which shut down decades ago. For fans of the show, the fenced-in visitor's area was to the left in this shot, and the prison's entrance was on the side of the building on the right. The grounds are surrounded by roads other structures which were obscured through the use of specific camera angles (and probably some CGI) to give the setting a very remote feel. From the angle of this shot for example, we may as well be in Panama. The aerial view of the complex in the TV grab above was probably a miniature model; in reality the building is roofed and the interior and yard scenes were filmed on a set in Dallas.

The exterior wall where a couple of the characters hung sheets and scaled down in a failed escape attempt.		The 'prison' entrance. Notice the "Penitenciaría Federal de Sona" (Spanish for "Federal Penitentiary of Sona") above the door, used for filming (though most of the letters have since gone missing).		Inside the old plant, now something of a haven for graffiti artists.

One of two watch towers still standing. I climbed both :)		The view from one.		And the view from the other, with downtown Fort Worth looking very dark and stormy in the background.

The rest of day 3 was spent scoping out more of western Dallas, and day 4 spent scoping out some of its south. After driving a total of 400 miles, we certainly liked what we saw of Dallas, but not enough to convince us it would be a worthwhile relocation. The neighborhoods that really appealed to us are all miles away from the central Dallas area, which would defeat the purpose of us moving there when we can find the same thing in Austin and still be much closer to its central core given the city's smaller size. Furthermore, Austin is only an hour or so from Kristina's family in San Antonio, which is convenient for the various family get-togethers. So whether we continue to rent or bite the bullet and buy our first home, at this stage it's looking like we'll be staying put in Austin :)

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