Day 8 - Waco to Abilene TX

Day eight and we've done 1300 miles - still haven't left Texas!  First up this morning we visited the local CBS-affiliated KWTX TV station.  One of my colleagues at MetService used to work here and managed to get us in the door.  Thanks Dan.


Here, Nige and I are having a shot at news-reading.

 My turn to be a TV weather man.  This is Ben - I watched him present the weather on KWTX earlier in the day.

Time to fire up the Chevy and head to Dallas.  Here's a random shot of a three-way fly-over on the way.  The on-ramps to the interstate are pretty impressive structures in some cases - much more elaborate and way LARGER than ours in NZ.

 Here's a shot of the Dallas CBD from an interstate feeder.  Pretty cool buildings here -  the largest we've seen for a while.

Our GPS took us on an unexpected tour of suburban Dallas-  before we realised the place had more than one Elm Street.  Here's a typical US house in a leafy suburban street that we otherwise wouldn't have seen....  By the way, we've changed the voice on the GPS from an Australian woman to an English male voice, we're calling Benson.  He talks a lot less than our Australian friend.

We sorted our GPS out and with several mirrors and copious amount of smoke we made it onto the correct Elm Street.  We lost our GPS signal as we moved into this glass and concrete canyon but by this time, we knew where we were heading.

Noticed this cool old building with some old advertising still painted on the side of it.  We were heading to the 6th Floor Museum; the Dallas County Administration Building (formerly the Texas School Book Depository) - the building JFK was shot from in 1963.  That's the red building at the end of the street in the picture below.

Here's a quick shot of a Chev Camaro...  Cool car, eh?

This is the view from the Grassy Knoll, adjacent to the site of the JFK assassination.

Here's a photo of the Grassy Knoll that I've aged a bit to make it look like it was taken at the time of the assassination.  The road you can see is the path the Presidential cavalcade was travelling at the time of the assassination.

The X on the road marks the spot of the fatal shot - the shot came from the building to the left in the picture below; 2nd to top floor, right-hand side.

Nige is quickly vacating the road as he's just realised the lights have changed and a couple of cars and a bus are speeding towards him.  

Here's the view from the Grassy Knoll, looking back towards the CBD.  The red castle-type building is a museum

Walking on Elm Street...

Once we got back to the car, there was a lovely little note from the local parking enforcement officers.  Nice one.  We had a feasible excuse, though... we had pumped enough quarters into the parking meter to sink a battleship and nothing came up on the meter, so left a note to suggest to the authorities that the meter was broke.

They didn't read it.

So we found the local governing office to try and get off our ticket.  I had a 'hearing' with a Judge Judy and explained our case.  Following my explanation, we were excused and our fine waived.  What nice folks...

Back to the car and we turned westward to Abilene, 200 miles down the road.  So now we're in the Bible Belt.  Great pizza for dinner and all set for our final day in Texas tomorrow - at least for a couple of days.

See you tomorrow.  PF