Our last campground was right on the Texas/Oklahoma border, so Amy and the girls took a field trip into Oklahoma to see a local pioneer museum. I didn’t go (I needed to work) but it sounds like what this museum lacked in outdoor sign creativity they made up for inside with meaningful exhibits about pioneer life. (I’m just realizing that my family has been to a state that I have not been to yet!)
We broke camp mid last week and headed west to Bridgeport TX, which is about 50 miles northwest of Fort Worth. Along the way, Amy and I split up — I continued to the next campsite in the RV with Carrie and Natalie while Amy and Emily took a side trip to Love Field at Dallas-Fort Worth airport to do some plane-spotting:
These are just a few of the many photos of planes Emily took and identified: (Clockwise, starting from the top left) An AirBus A340, a Boeing 737, an AirBus A319, a Boeing 747 (aka “the whale”), an Embraer ERJ 145, and another Boeing 757. Emily is just a little fascinated with planes.
On Saturday we drove into Fort Worth to visit the Cowgirl Museum, which Natalie was pretty excited about. We didn’t know quite what to expect, but it was a pretty inspiring history of women in western entertainment, sports, art, and agriculture.
Natalie sitting on a saddle seat watching one of the museum movies about women in western films. (Yes, I believe that’s a woman gunslinger popping a cap in some poor dude. Go girl!)
After the Cowgirl Museum, we drove over to the Fort Worth Stockyard. These stockyards opened in the 1890s and became a hugely popular marketplace for Texas ranchers to sell their cattle for the next 90 years.
We stopped at M.L. Leddy’s handmade boot store. Amy picked up and looked at one pair of boots and I thought she told me they were $285, which sounded rather expensive to me. I just found out I misheard her: they were $1,285!
The boots, the hats…it all just struck me how “Texas” Texas really is:
For $5, you could sit on this longhorn to get your photo taken. That sounded like a pretty good deal at first, but it turns out they want you to pay them the $5.
One of the old buildings where cattle deals went down. In its heyday, about a million cattle per year would change hands here.
In the afternoons, they trot a herd of longhorns down the road. It’s just for show now, but this is how they used to bring in all the cattle to be bought and sold. Those horns sure make an impressive animal.
The girls trying some local $3 cupcakes:
Though today is Sunday, it was a school and work day (we’re traveling tomorrow so that will be the rest of our “weekend”). It was a rather overcast day and even rained hard last night, but the clouds completely disappeared by the end of the afternoon. Perfect weather for baseballs and mits.
We’re breaking camp early tomorrow and will drive for about 8 hours until we get to New Mexico. All I know about our next campground is that it’s electric-only (no water, no sewer), so that means we’ll be in water-conservation mode for the next several days.
It’s been a while since we’ve NOT had full hookups (we’ve gotten spoiled), so it will be interesting to see how we do. We’ll have to make sure everyone gets showers before we pull out of here.