Hello Hive and hello Pinmapple community,
Hope you are doing well and enjoying your week. It is time for my next episode of travelling through USA, or better say state of Texas in USA. I will remain in Dallas and vicinity for day 2 as well. If you might miss first edition of my new travel series, you can find it on the following link. It was mainly about rodeo which I visited a few hours after landing on American soil. There was also an intro of how I decided for the trip and bunch of nice photos.
I will try to keep it interesting with part two as well. As already mentioned, I will stay in Dallas or better say in Forth Worth where I visited the rodeo on first evening.
Fort Worth is part of Dallas metropolitan area. If we are looking to Fort Worth as an individual city, it is actually 5th biggest in Texas and actually 13th largest city in whole US, which is huge! I would never say so, but yes that is how big Fort Worth/Dallas really is. Population of Fort Worth appears to be just under 1 million which is as much as half of my home country, Slovenia.
I read a lot about Fort Worth before coming to US and have high expectations since I read mostly very positive reviews. I have to say, it fulfilled my expectations as a very nice city. It has a soul, which I often find missing in large US cities. Probably that is due to its historic part which was very lively that day. Merit for that goes to special date for the state of Texas – 2nd of March being Texas Independence Day. There was some live country music and a lot of people gathering for their famous longhorn cattle drive. That cattle drive is happening every day, twice a day and is a nice diversification of everyday in regular city. There were a lot of kids and I know that my little ones would enjoy that event very much as well. You could also ride that longhorn cattle and take a photo as a souvenir, but my weight would be a bit too much for that poor animal :)
Another reason why I like that part of Fort Worth that much is local restaurant there. One of the best cousins I tried. Really a must stop if you will ever be around and I am so jealous on folks living there since they can just say to themselves, lets go eat there now. That place is called H3 Ranch. Iconic place is a part of famous Stockyards Hotel and prices are reflecting that. While looking at the menu, you don’t get a feeling that prices are inflated compared to what we are used to, when you get your final bill, you pay a lot for your lunch. But totally worth every penny and I did repeat my visit on the very last day and would do it again and again, without thinking about it twice. I had famous Texas brisket and my father dad half rack ribs and a smoked sausage. We shared our main course a bit and everything was going awesome, to amazing and all the way to perfection. I never ate that good sausage! They prepared it with a little bit of fresh grinded mixed pepper and taste was really amazing. Their sauce is delicious as well, especially with brisket. All flavoured to perfection!
Prices are around 20 – 25$ for main dish and you get two delicious sides with it as well. Never ate better corn before! What add on to the final bill is beer for example which goes close to 10 dollars and add tax to all of it, plus 18% tip at the end. So you come close to 40 bucks per person for a lunch and you don’t profit much anymore when you are converting it to EURO anymore :)
But as I said, I was more than satisfied and visited it again before I left Texas when I was in Fort Worth again on the last day, but more from that time when we come to it.
Now it is time to wrap up my exploring of Fort Worth for day 2 with visit of downtown. My main goal was to get a little bit of an atmosphere from there as well and to capture some nice photos of the famous Fort Worth Water Gardens where you can play with water a bit. I soon find out that atmosphere will not be the right one, since everything was closed due to before mentioned holiday. That mostly business district and that is why I only saw few people in my two hours walkaround of that part of Fort Worth. But concerning photography, that was on as I managed to capture some photos of Water Gardens. It is a nice complex and if you can’t have natural waterfalls, you have to be satisfied with what these gardens have to offer :)
That was about it for our first adventure of the travel. Later on, we spent few hours shopping as I had to bought something in return for my wife kindness and for leaving kids waiting on his daddy to return. Well at the end of the day, I ended with 36 articles only in Tommy Hilfiger outlet store plus about 10 additional in Tommy Hilfiger Kids store :)
I have to say that burned most of my budget and time as well, so I didn’t spend much elsewhere that day and I also knew that I have scheduled a few hours stop at Premium Outlets in Houston as well. I have to say, that shopping there is very, very wort it. I paid less than 20 Dollars per item which is amazing as there is hardly anything to get from that brand in Slovenia for under 50 EUR. So that is another reason why I like to visit US that much. Food for sure and shopping as well :)
Our day didn’t end with shopping, but we had hockey game planned for that day as well. Los Angeles Kings were coming to town for the Meeting with home team of Dallas Stars. I have to admit, that I am not a huge hockey fan, even though our country had some major success in it through the recent years. I can highlight quarter finals on Olympic Games, probably two or three editions back, some good matchups we had also in relatively strong European league; EBEL (now ICEHL) and last but not least our most famous hockey player is a star. One of the legends from the legendary club LA Kings. I am sure all hockey fans know Anže Kopitar. He helped them win two Stanley Cups and were in the mix for MVP for few times already. He is also known as one of the best defenders among players who are playing in attacking roles plus at the end, he is a gentleman and a very nice man with a lot of respect.
It was the right decision to go and see the game and actually they hosted Mexican night for that day, so there was some special happening in front of the American Airlines Centre. I will write more about the arena and sports events in some of the future posts as I am long in writing today anyway and I that was just my first visit of the arena with three more coming.
Event was nice, but we were really tired and jetlag come a bit behind us. We were suffering a bit as we weren’t dressed correctly so it was a bit cold in the arena. We also had to woke up early next morning since there was 500+ kilometres drive awaiting us the next day. We accepted decision to leave early from the game and go to bed. That was the right decision considering the big tempo of upcoming days. And looks like we brought luck to the home team as they were trailing when we were watching and won at the end. Kopitar didn’t score or assist on that game, but I hope he will do a lot of his tricks in the postseason which is coming soon.
Let that be it for today and hope you are not to tired after reading that “book”, so you will be able to go through photos as well. All comments are appreciated.
Have a great day guys!
