Dallas

On my way to Puerto Vallarta for the Inter Americas Hash 2007 (IAH07) I decided to stop off in Dallas and visit my nephew James who I haven’t seen for more than 12 years. Here are a few notes about that visit… (I am trying to find some way of describing what happened at the IAH07 that will not lead to prosecution... watch this space)

I flew with American Airlines from Gatwick on Friday 24th August. Gatwick is a good option for me as I can get there by train from North Camp station which is only 10 miles from Dockenfield. The journey takes just under an hour and the one way ticket is only £10 so it beats driving. So the journey started well, but took a nosedive at check-in - it was a nightmare.

I stood in line for an hour just to check in. Everyone was subjected to a 5 minute security interview ranging from where you were going to stay in the ‘land of the free’ to where you had bought your luggage before you were allowed to even approach the check-in desk. There was even a trick question ‘Can you describe to me any item given to you by someone else to carry to the USA?’ – the security lady wasn’t impressed by my answer of ‘No’.

Having checked in there was then a bit of a queue to go through security where I had to take off my shoes and have them X-rayed in a special shoe X-ray device – I am so glad that Richard Reid was the ‘Shoe Bomber’ and not the ‘Underpants Bomber’.

It was a long flight. After 6 hours I was really ready for the landing, but there was another 4 hours to wait for that. I watched ‘Shrek the Third’ (twice) and ‘Lucky You’ which turned out to be a surprisingly interesting film about poker players in Las Vegas. I had an aisle seat at the end of a bank of 5 seats. My immediate neighbours were a family of three and to my surprise they put their little boy, coincidently called James, next to me, then the father and then finally the mother. James was pretty good considering he was only about 4 years old, though he did get the fidgets quite often and needed to go to the loo about 4 times during the flight, so it wasn’t the nightmare I had expected when he sat next to me.

Immigration at Dallas wasn’t too terrible despite having my photo taken and being fingerprinted. Given the grilling and suspicion at Gatwick I had almost expected a bouquet or perhaps a badge 'Thank you for not blowing up the plane', but all there was were forms to fill in and a queue...

I was a surprised that despite being about the last person on the flight to get through immigration when I got down to the baggage carousel everyone was still waiting for their bags – and we all waited a further 45 minutes. There wasn't very much to do; the sign at the carousel made me smile for a minute. It was a picture of a parrot with the caption "Don't smuggle me, I might be sick" - obviously the expression "As sick as a parrot" is not known in Dallas. Having explored the baggage hall, used the toilets, wondered why there were 'Severe Weather Areas' in the hall (close to the loos), and admired the sniffer dogs, I began to seriously wonder if American Airlines had lost all the bags. I wondered how I would be able to manage the next couple of weeks with just the clothes I had on - running would be difficult - as would my planned scuba diving certification. I just started to wonder how I could get my missing suitcase sent on to Mexico and how I would know it had arrived when the conveyor belt stated up. Eventually my bag appeared and I had only one more cross examination and set of documents to hand over and then I was free and allowed to set foot on American soil...

James was patiently waiting for me in the arrivals hall. He was instantly recognisable despite the years since I last saw him. He took me to his massive RV style car and as we chatted I was glad to hear that his accent was definitely English rather than Texan despite all the years he has spent in the Lone Star State. He drove me down the massive empty highway that leads from the huge Dallas Fort Worth airport to Dallas which stands out from the surrounding plain as a collection of towers and skyscrapers - I couldn't help being reminded of the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz!

James had recommended I book myself a room in The Belmont Hotel. It turned out to be a delightfully renovated Art Deco style American Motel complete with Bates Motel style chalets perched on a small cliff just outside Dallas city centre.

After dumping the bag and having a shower I joined James in the bar for a quick drink before we headed of to his ‘local’ The Old Monk. I was amazed to find that there were about a dozen Belgian beers on the menu. It was just like being back in Brussels. Because all the beers were so familiar I decided to branch out a bit. I started with a Franiskanner which was unfortunately served with a slice of lemon!

Once we had our drinks we found a table outside and started trying to catch up the 12 years that have passed since we last talked. While we chatted we were continuously greeted by James’ many friends. We ordered some food – I had calamari and chips as my stomach really wasn’t sure what time it was – there is a 6 hour time difference between London and Dallas and so my body clock was telling me it was about 2am while the local time was only 8pm. The very pretty waitress was very attentive and ensure we never ran out of beer or iced water which I drank a lot of being dehydrated from the flight and it being very hot despite it being the middle of the night. I switched beers to Sierra Nevada which I remembered from previous trips to the USA – an excellent IPA.

We talked for hours and exchanged a lot of information about our lives and our family. I didn’t notice the time passing and was really surprised to find it was around midnight when we left (or 6am to me).

I slept pretty well until 6am local time (or noon body clock time) thanks to the beer, and then I woke up and stayed awake for about an hour– my body was telling me it was well passed the time to get up. I eventually I dozed off again and finally got up at 9am and had a buffet breakfast of some sort of granola nuts in vanilla flavoured yoghurt (America, what is wrong with yoghurt flavoured yoghurt?) followed by a muffin. Back in the room I checked my 50-odd emails (the hotel has free wireless internet access) and then I went for an explore around the hotel grounds and found that it was bigger than I thought with chalets extending quite some way back from mine and that there was a small pool at the foot of a cliff. I was tempted to go for a dip, but James was due to come and collect me at 11am so I didn’t have time. I took a photo of downtown Dallas’s skyscrapers and then walked down to the front entrance to the hotel and at that moment James drove up in his huge RV.

On the way to brunch we drove around the deserted centre of Dallas for a while and past the ‘Grassy Knoll’ where President Kennedy had been assassinated. I was surprised to discover how close it was to my hotel and how it would otherwise be such a small insignificant little patch of grass by a fairly insignificant set of old (for Dallas) buildings near an unremarkable underpass.

We ate an excellent Tex-Mex meal in an almost deserted restaurant before returning to the city centre and getting out of the a/ced car into the Turkish bath called Texas in August having parked just behind the infamous Dallas School Book Depository. We spent a long time (considering how seriously hot and humid it was) walking around the site looking at the two X’s on the road that marked the spots where President Kennedy was hit by the bullets. I took a few photos of the area and James

and then we went into the School Book Depository and paid to go up to the 6th Floor Museum.

It was very detailed recounting all aspects of Kennedy’s life and presidency. The actual spot where Lee Harvey Oswald shot from was behind a glass screen and there were stacks of boxes to recreate the actual set up he used for the assassination. Unfortunately that meant you couldn’t actually get the same view of the road as he had, but the view from the next window showed it was really quite a difficult task to shot a person in a car moving at about 20mph and hit him twice. The museum covered the conspiracies and the theories – there certainly were a lot of odd facts about the murder and the events around it. Where there two shooters? Were there 3 or 4 shots? How did the bullet that hit the President and the governor turn up on a stretcher in the hospital without a scratch on it? Why was the autopsy so badly carried out, without photographs or X-rays? etc etc etc. It was all very interesting but almost overpowering too.

As a total antidote we decided to visit a mall next. On the way there my propensity as a "Rain God" manifested itself and we got rain and a nice little electrical storm to entertain us as we manoeuvred our way through a series of traffic jams that had appeared out of nowhere. One thing up until this point I had noticed about Dallas was that it was basically uninhabited and there were almost no cars on the road - except on Saturday afternoons when it rained apparently.

The mall (shopping centre) was huge and full of very swanky shops.

We cruised around and at James' suggestion I did break a habit of a lifetime and part with some money for clothes ("Well done, James"). To recover from the shock of actually buying clothes that I didn't desperately need, but just liked the look of we visited an outrageous gadget shop that was full of the most amazing crap. My favourite gadget was a voice recognition device that would allow the lazy to dictate their shopping list and then print it out so they could then take it shopping with them. I was disappointed that the device wasn't able to be connected to the internet so that one could just do the shopping without even getting out of bed. Another fantastic labor (sic) saving device was an electronic kitchen towel dispenser which would at the touch of a button issue you with a sheet of kitchen roll. Again a fabulous idea that didn't actually go far enough as you still had to tear off the paper from the roll and then personally, using more than a finger, use it to wipe up something - such lack of vision!

We then drove a few miles to a computer store where I was sorely tempted by a postage stamp sized 1GB iPod on sale for $100. The only thing that stopped me from buying it was the potential problems with charging it in Europe or UK as the US plugs, voltage and Hz are totally different.

The richness of the consumerism, or perhaps the shock of spending money on clothes or perhaps just jetlag had brought on a headache so James took me back to the hotel for a rest before taking me out again for dinner.

We had the option of driving 20 miles out of town to a party or staying in Dallas and visiting a load more bars. I chose the latter option so James took me to a genuine American burger bar called The Twisted Root. The burgers were excellent and I had a couple of glasses of a pale ale called ‘Fat Tyre’ – it wasn’t bad, but not up to the quality of the beer we were drinking the previous night. They also had 'deep fried macaronni' a strange but rather pleasant concoction of cholesterol and carbohydrates that James loved. I paid using my ‘get out of jail’ $50 bill – James reckoned that the $20 bill I was also had hidden in my a secret pocket in my waller for emergencies was no longer legal tender; it had been in my wallet for over 10 years, so I wasn’t surprised.

Afterwards James took me to another excellent bar called The Ginger Man (no obvious connection with the eponymous pub in Dublin, or the excellent novel by J.P. Donleavy) we stood outside at the back for quite some time trying a range of excellent beers including ‘Stone’ and Dogfish Head 60 Minutes the latter was almost overpowering as the 60 minutes refers to how long the hops were boiled in it. I managed to break a glass by nudging it off a rail and down into the garden area – it shattered spectacularly and frightened the group sitting quite close – they kept up a friendly teasing for quite some time afterwards. After a while a friend of James called Wallace turned up – he was a little older than me, I think, and from Chicago. We had a good time chatting and drank a lot of beer.

We then decided to go to the next bar The Idle Rich that was within walking distance. Wallace and I walked (or rather staggered) while James had to drive to move his car. ‘The Idle Rich’ had a huge range of beers but it was very noisy and very crowded, mainly I seem to remember with beautiful women, but that could be 'beer goggles'. I think we only stayed for one beer and then James drove me back to the hotel.

Not surprisingly I had a bit of a headache when I woke up, but I had slept the whole night through, so the beer had defeated the jet lag. I packed and breakfasted and then checked my flight details on line. I then realised I had lost the printed itinerary I had used to check in at Gatwick, and the website suggested I would need it to check in for the flight to PV which was a bit of a worry.

At just after 10am I got a call to say James was waiting for me in reception. I went and paid up and we were soon on the road again. As we arrived at the airport James asked me which terminal I was flying from. I told him I had forgotten to check, but I thought it was Terminal D, the same as the one I had landed at on Friday. We drove around the airport while he tried to phone American Airlines to find the terminal details – I unfortunately misremembered my flight number so we got details of a flight from Miami that was totally useless. We stopped at Terminal A and went in to see if there was anyone to ask. There wasn’t. And the flight didn’t appear on any of the screens so I attempted to get the details by doing an electronic check-in, but it wouldn’t tell me the gate without me checking in first and I didn’t want to do that if this was the wrong terminal. Fortunately James phoned again and this time got the correct flight number and terminal (it was ‘D’) from a human being rather than a voice recognition system. It was only a short drive to D where James dropped me off outside and we said our goodbyes there.

I had a wonderful time with James in Dallas and promised to return soon for a longer trip - and dear reader never believe anyone who tells you that all American beer is crap - most of it is, but there are some wonderful micro breweries to be discovered. The same goes for bars too.