Fort Worth

Another good day yesterday. After enjoying Helga's home-made breakfast, we left for Fort Worth, approx 35 miles down the road. Fort Worth is adjoining Dallas, much like Kitchener-Waterloo. The whole DFW (Dallas-Fort-Worth) metropolis is about 60 miles in diameter with a population of 6.5 million.
Our first stop was at Dave's sister's house just down the road. She had kindly agreed to doggy-sit for the day. Max had to stay behind cuz we were planning on going out for lunch.
Around 11 am we arrived at the Fort Worth Botanical Gardens, consisting of 109 acres and 2500 species of flowers, trees, shrubs, etc.  Beautiful! We wandered for about 2 hours, tho you could easily spend 2 days there!
Then off to Joe-T Garcia's Mexican Restaurant, a beautiful walled-in huge open-air spot with tables interspersed among lush gardens, even a fountain and pond. The food was great (fajitas, nachos, etc) and as usual, the servings were big enough that we shared one appetizer and one entree and still had lots of leftovers for an evening snack at home.
While Dallas is more of  a city/business centre, Fort Worth is heavily into western/cowboy culture. a whole section of town is known as the stockyards, which has been a hub for cattle trading since the 1800's. Many cattle-related businesses and tourist attractions here, including a covered open-air mall of entirely western-type clothes, souvenirs, etc. And of course Joanne and Helga each had to take the opportunity to mount a real-live long-horn steer for a photo op. One of the neat touristy items was a cattle-run thru the district every day at 4 pm which we took in, after visiting the world's largest honky-tonk, Billy Bob's, a huge place much reminiscent of Kitchener's original Lulu's. Great numbers of well-known musicians have performed here, and numerous episodes of the TV series, Dallas, had scenes shot here.
Around 6 pm we went to pick up our doggy at Barb's place and wound up having a great chat and dessert there until about 9 pm.
By then we were kinda exhausted and packed it in for the day.
...k