My husband, Corkey, had a work trip planned to his company headquarters in Dallas, Texas in June, and we worked it out so that I could tag along.  We had a lot of fun and I wanted to share what we did in case you are planning a trip there anytime soon.

We traveled there on Monday, June 19 and returned on Sunday, June 25.  The weather was hot – the forecast was calling for 102 – 105 degrees in the days leading up to our departure.  It was hot, but rain showers almost every afternoon made it bearable and not unlike Georgia summer heat.  The funny thing is, we were experiencing a very mild June at the time in Georgia, so I wasn’t quite acclimated to the hotter temperatures yet when we arrived.  Of course, by the time we came home, the weather was getting hotter, so we kind of got thrown right into Summer.  That’s ok – we are used to summer temps starting in early to mid-May most years, so a longer Spring was a treat for us in Georgia!

Monday, June 19 was a travel day for us.  We left Atlanta at 2:30 p.m. EST and arrived in Dallas at around 4:00 p.m.  We had a car reserved for me in Dallas, so along with one of my husband’s co-workers, we drove to Irving, Texas where we were staying.  We stopped at a Kroger on our way to the hotel and grabbed a few snacks, beverages, and breakfast items for the kitchenette before checking in.  I get car sick easily and had terrible vertigo from the shuttle bus from the parking deck in Atlanta and from the plane taxiing on the runway, so my husband went out and grabbed dinner for us.  The older I get, the more travel exhausts me, so we were in our pj’s early and watched a little TV in bed.

On Tuesday, June 20, I had planned to take a drive while Corkey worked, but I was still reeling with vertigo and hadn’t slept well the night before.  I ended up staying in all day, reading, napping, and watching tv.  It was glorious!  Corkey worked all day and went out with work friends that evening, so it was a quiet day for me.

On Wednesday, June 21, I was feeling much better, so I planned to spend the day at the hotel pool due to the heat.  I wasn’t there long before scattered showers started, and we had evening plans with work friends, so I went back to the room and got ready.  About 20 of us met at Grapevine Mall for an escape room experience.  It was SO fun!  Neither Corkey or I had done this before, so I think it was especially fun as first timers.  His work friends were so kind to include me, and I really enjoyed getting to know some of the folks in the Texas office I have heard him talk about for years.

On Thursday, June 22, while Corkey worked, I drove out to Lindale, Texas which is an hour and half east of where I was staying.  I drove through a lot of farm country, mostly on a four-lane highway (Hwy 20). I love a good road trip! I am a HUGE Miranda Lambert fan and have been for many years, so this was my second trip to Lindale to visit her store called The Pink Pistol.  Lindale is the cutest little, small town and they are so proud of Miranda!  They even named the street that Pink Pistol is on after her – it is called Miranda Lambert Way.  I hung out for about an hour, taking a couple of laps around the store before making my purchases. 

I was glad that they had a section of the store dedicated to Miranda’s home goods line, Wanda June Home, which is otherwise only available at Wal-Mart.com.  I hadn’t seen any of the items in person, and I was so impressed with the quality of everything. Everything had more of a high-end look compared to what I had seen online.  Now that I know that the items are worth the price, I have a few things in mind to get for our house!  All the textiles were heavy, thick, and durable.  The pillows and poufs were much larger than they seem online and are very full and firm.  The pottery is vibrant and heavy duty.  I’d like to have a couple of the poufs for additional seating in our Game Room and I want a door mat set.  Many of the door mats are actually two-piece door mat sets, following the recent trend of having a layered rug look at your front door.

I also loved the section of the store dedicated to Idyllwind, a lifestyle brand for the confident, adventurous, perfectly imperfect badass women.  This section of the store had jeans, outerwear, tops, jewelry, belts, and boots from Miranda’s clothing line.  Same as with the Wanda June Home line, I really liked being able to see the quality of the products in person rather than only being able to see online.

Miranda’s family also has Red 55 Winery, a collection of Texas signature wines.  Wine is sold retail at the Pink Pistol and there is a tasting area called the Hemingway Room.

Probably my favorite part of the Pink Pistol is the t-shirt wall. One entire wall of the store is dedicated to a huge variety of t-shirts.  My photos here do not do it justice.

All in all, the Pink Pistol is a fun store, packed to the brim with a large variety of merchandise, not just for Miranda fans, but also for Texas loving, cowboy lifestyle lovers as well.

Note: Please don’t come at me about Miranda’s recent rant at her Vegas show with the selfie ladies. I am not the boss of her, in fact I don’t think anyone is the boss of her. Everyone has a bad day now and then. Try to forgive and forget then take a listen to her new song with Leon Bridges called “If You Were Mine”. Also, I had this post planned out at least a month before that incident happened, I had no way of knowing this would be such an issue right now. Thank you in advance for your understanding!

I returned to our hotel just a little while before Corkey got in from work.  We headed towards Grapevine, but ended up in Southlake Town Square, a very ritzy walkable outdoor mall like the Avenues of West Cobb/East Cobb in Georgia.  All the stores were very high end and we joked that we’d better move on because we couldn’t afford to shop there! 

On our way out, we passed by The Lonesome Dove Baptist Church and Cemetery, which I thought was uncanny because I had chosen to read the book Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry on this trip.  We chalked it up to coincidence and didn’t even stop to take a photo.  After we got home from this trip, Corkey discovered that while writing his novel, originally titled The Streets of Laredo, Larry McMurtry saw an old bus with Lonesome Dove Baptist Church on the side. He then changed the name of his novel to Lonesome Dove.

Corkey had been telling me about a BBQ place where he had eaten on a previous trip and had promised to take me there, so we headed to Hard 8 BBQ in Coppell, Tx.  He wasn’t lying – I had the best brisket I have ever tasted there – so good!

On Friday, most of the employees were headed home, but we had already planned to extend our stay through the weekend.  So, Corkey took the day off and we had a full day planned.  We started by going to the JFK Museum in Dallas.  It is called The Sixth Floor at Dealy Plaza.  We often joke about being “Kennedys” and we affectionately call JFK “Uncle John” so when the museum was recommended by two different friends of ours, we knew we had to go.  It is a must see if you are even remotely into history.  There were details of the assassination that I didn’t know before going to the museum, and you can easily spend two hours there to see everything.  The exhibits are very well done and because of the growth of amateur photography in the 1960’s the assassination was documented down to the second by several photographers, from different vantage points around Dealy Plaza.  There was even a re-creation of the area of the warehouse in which Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots from the corner window of the sixth floor.  The street in front of the warehouse, now museum, is marked with an “X” to mark where the motorcade was when JFK was hit.

After we left Dealy Plaza, there was a hat bar in the area on Commerce Street that I wanted to visit.  Hat bars are big in Texas and Tennessee, I’d love to see one open here in Atlanta!  Flea Style is a shop with five locations in the Dallas area.  The owner shops for vintage items at the local trade days in Texas and Oklahoma and during antiques week a few times a year to fill the store with cool vintage finds.  Of course, there is a lot of Texas themed décor and clothing as well, cowboy boots, western fashion, leather goods, etc.  The premise of the hat bar is that you select a hat, which is displayed without any adornments, then you go to the “bar” and select accessories for your hat. 

I have made four of my own hats this year from hats and accessories I bought on Amazon, but I wanted to do this in a store, thinking that there would be a wider variety of accessories and that I could receive help and suggestions from the staff as well.  The staff can even burn designs into the felt using a burning tool! This was honestly the one thing that I really wanted to do most of all while I was in Texas, and even after visiting two of the Flea Style stores, (we also visited the store in Fort Worth) I couldn’t find a hat that I liked!  A week or two after we got home, Corkey found the hat that I had liked most, a pale blue straw Stetson at a store online and bought it for me and it is perfect!  I’m glad we didn’t get it in Texas, it would have been hard to travel home with it. (I’ll do a post on the hats I have made sometime in the near future!)

Next, we headed to Fort Worth to visit the Stockyards.  There were a couple of things we had planned to do at the Stockyards, one was to see the cattle drive and the other was to visit Billy Bob’s honky tonk and concert hall.  We walked all over the stockyards, there are lots of western wear stores, leather stores, restaurants, etc.  We grabbed some souvenirs here for our son and some friends.  Old Gringo Boots has their flagship store at the stockyards and of course I pined over a pair of boots!  There was a downpour summer shower around 3:00 p.m. so we ducked into a restaurant to eat and wait out the rain.  The storm passed just in time for the 4:00 p.m. cattle drive, and we were so lucky that this was the last day they would be doing the 4:00 p.m. cattle drive due to the heat.  People came out of the stores and lined the streets, as if waiting for a parade.  A charming older gentleman cowboy was on a microphone and narrated the history of the cattle drive over a speaker system while the drovers got the cattle ready.  Now we both thought there would be a lot of cattle on this drive.  Do you want to guess how many there were?  Twelve. There were twelve cattle, friends!  There were 6 or 8 drovers (cowboys) for a dozen cattle.  It was a little underwhelming, but I’m sure it isn’t cost effective to do that every day, twice a day for tourists!  In my mind, I had pictured a near stampede, with cattle kicking up dust everywhere, deafening noise and maybe even the ground shaking a little.  Now you see why I was underwhelmed – ha!

Next, we headed back towards our vehicle because we had parked next to Billy Bob’s.  It was only around 4:30 – 4:45 p.m. by this time, so we knew we were too early for live music, but I wanted to grab some souvenirs for friends in the gift shop.  I was a little bummed that we had to pay $3 each just to go inside to shop, but it turned out to be worth it!  After we finished at the gift shop, we walked around a bit.  First, the place is massive!  There are two stages.  One of course is the main stage that takes up the back wall of the building, and there was another, smaller stage in the middle of the building.  As we were headed out, we came across the best part of the whole place…a long hallway, in which the walls were lined with framed, concrete handprints with signatures of all the artists who had played there over the years.  Lots of promotional signs for past concerts, memorabilia, etc.  We walked up and down the hallway checking out all the artists who had played there.  As a die-hard country music fan, this was easily a highlight of the trip for me, and an unexpected one at that!  Check out all the kisses on the Johnny Cash square.

Saturday, June 24 we had planned a road trip to a small town called Glen Rose, Texas on the recommendation of Corkey’s boss.  We drove about an hour and a half southwest to Glen Rose, but on our way, we drove through Cleburne, Texas and Corkey saw a museum he decided to stop at.  It turned out to be the The Chisholm Trail Outdoor Museum and Big Bear Native American Museum.  The entry fee was $8 each and worth every penny.  We happened to be there on a day when they were preparing for an evening wedding.  Also, that day, members of Terry’s Texas Rangers, a civil war reenactment unit were onsite acting as docents for the museum and later that evening, they were going to fire off a canon for the wedding.  We stood around the museum listening to these gentlemen tell us the history of the Texas Rangers and all about some of their favorite lawmen over the years. One gentleman had lived in Atlanta in the 1970’s and we spent a lot of time talking to him about places in the metro area that he remembered.  Another gentleman was none other than the CEO of the museum, Mr. David Murdoch and we found him to be a born storyteller! Before we left, the men and one woman were talking to us all at once, telling us where we must visit when we come back to Texas again.  It was a highlight of the trip, for sure! 

The Big Bear Native American Museum was small but packed with artifacts, photographs, and placards. Leonard J. “Big Bear” Beal was the only child of a half Cherokee mother and an Irish father.  He lived an amazing life, spending 50 years in California, he helped establish the Los Angeles Indian Center and was Chief of the Lumbee nation.  He was a movie extra for 20 years, a professional wrestler, a Spanish teacher for adult education, a police officer, a member of a country music band, a Mason, a Shriner, and a steam locomotive engineer and fireman. The Big Bear Museum contains his personal memorabilia, collected over his lifetime.  There was specific information about many local and larger tribes and a historical outline detailing all Native American tribes across the United States.  We enjoyed the museum and I think elementary age kids especially would love it.

Now, please take a moment to appreciate with me the irony of our happening upon a museum dedicated to the Chisholm Trail, of which, most of the Texas segment would have been the same trail that Augustus McRae and Captain Woodrow Call took from Lonesome Dove to Montana on their cattle drive. (The original Chisholm Trail ran from South Texas/Mexico to Kansas, where the nearest train depot was in order to ship cattle back east.) We had not read about or heard of the museum, nor did we realize that the route we took that day followed the Chisholm Trail.  We were just enjoying the drive to a little small town and SURPRISE!

Lonesome Dove is one of my favorite books, I have read it three of four times, and I loved the miniseries as well. Larry McMurtry received the Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. I felt so tickled on this trip at all of the common threads we experienced - it was such a treat for me!

We then made our way to Glen Rose, which wasn’t far at all from the Chisolm Trail Museum.  Glen Rose is known for dinosaur fossils being discovered all over the area.  There is a dinosaur museum and a big open field with sculptures of dinosaurs dotted all across the field.  We didn’t visit the museum but passed it on the way.  Glen Rose was a very small town and businesses were mostly closed by the time we arrived which was only midafternoon.  One of the only businesses open was Shoo Fly Soda Shop, a vintage soda shop and gift shop.  They had counter service and a unique menu, in addition to Blue Bell Ice Cream, so we took a couple of seats and ordered a corn dog basket.  They were so good!  We followed that up with ice cream of course.  Corkey got a hot fudge sundae, and I got two scoops in a waffle cone, chocolate and chocolate mint ice cream.  It was so nice to sit in the cool air, listening to 1950’s Elvis hits, resting and enjoying good food while listening to the mostly local crowd talk about life.  I have a soft spot for small towns and Glen Rose was very sweet!

We drove back to our hotel, stopping at Chick Fil A on the way.  The heat of the day had made us tired and after dinner, we watched a little TV and did as much packing as we could.

Sunday, June 25 we got up early, hit up a place in Irving, Tx called Jam & Toast for breakfast, which was WONDERFUL and headed to the airport.  The flight was uneventful, but on arrival in Atlanta, we realized that our checked luggage had been left behind in Dallas.  We filed a report with American Airlines baggage claim office and thanked our lucky stars that the suitcase only contained dirty clothes, shoes, and souvenirs.  Fortunately, a courier delivered our bag to us by Tuesday evening and everything was accounted for and intact.

I had so much fun on this trip and can’t wait to go back!  I have enjoyed Texas every time we have been and there are still so many places I want to see.  I hope to be able to tag along with Corkey the next time he needs to go for work, or I would gladly make a return trip to the Austin area just about any time.  I would also love to go to Antiques Week in Round Top one of these days.  Antiques week is usually held in April and October, both of which I think would be great times to go and enjoy milder temperatures!  I think I would avoid a trip to Texas from July through September due to the heat.  I was in Austin, Round Top, and Houston twelve years ago during the week before Thanksgiving and the weather was perfect!  I wore jeans the whole time, only needed a sweater or jacket at night, and never broke a sweat at all.  Eventually, I would like to see West Texas, but that may be a trip for our retirement years!

What is your favorite place in Texas?  What do we need to add to our list of things to see when we return?  As always, if you have questions or wish to write me, you can comment here or email me at hello@kinshipandvine.com