A Little Taste of Fort Worth

Wow. The Dallas/Fort Worth area is REALLY LARGE. SUPER BIG. We are only here until Monday and there is no way we will even put a dent in seeing this area. We do plan on hitting all the art museums and just wandering the city streets downtown to try to get the general vibe of the place... but we will still just be dipping our pinkie toes in I think.

Tonight we drove in to Fort Worth (we are staying in Arlington which is in between there and Dallas) and went to the Amon Carter Museum. It is an amazingly nice museum (small but full of good stuff) with a fabulous collection (in our opinion anyway) and it is free to visit. They have tons of Frederick Remington's work which we love (saw a lot of it in Santa Fe when we lived there) and several other artists from the late 1800 we are very interested in as well. THIS painting (<-- click it) is one that Billy was excited to see. It's a view of the area where he grew up painted 130 some years ago by Martin Johnson Heade . The far shore line in the piece is where his Mom's house is... pretty cool. I loved seeing THIS Grant Wood piece... and we photographed several other pieces just to have them in our photo files as having seen them in person. We are geeks like that. Here are a few of our faves we saw tonight...









Those are all Remingtons. I LOVE the last black and white of the dude on the bike cruising past the stage coach and freaking out the horses. What a crazy painting. He captures such energy and spirit in every piece. Great stuff to see even if you are not into the cowboy southwesty stuff.

When we came out of the museum it was after dark and the moon (full tonight?) had just risen over downtown Fort Worth's skyline. I did not have my tripod but I was able to get a decent enough shot to show you... it was a great visual.




We headed downtown to walk around and find some food. We (of course) had Rudy with so we found a Cajun cafe that had outdoor seating and ordered up a ton of grub. We had fried okra, fried green beans ( we went a little crazy on the fried stuff), Billy ordered a big ole plate of something called Cajun Tricky Fish with Dirty Rice which I will show you here....



And I had some kind of pasta the cook whipped up for me special since they did not have a single vegetarian item on the menu (welcome to Texas!) It was good and spicy and I was not let down.

Downtown Fort Worth is pretty at night. All the trees are lit with white lights and there is a lot of color in cool, retro, neon signs along with some neat architecture. They actually have FREE parking lots right downtown. We stopped off for a decaf coffee after dinner and then headed home because we are all three pretty road weary. Tomorrow we head into Dallas. I feel completely overwhelmed by the idea of downtown Dallas but maybe it won't be as crazy as I am picturing. I'll post tomorrow night on what we find...