Tracing JR Ewing's Daily Commute

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Our hotel is really unusual and looks like it's a converted warehouse or factory of some sort. Our room has an extremely high ceiling and a huge support pillar in the middle. Character is what I would call it, although I'm not so sure about the concrete floor - I'm sure there's carpet that would have been in keeping with the character.

We are planning to do the Dallas tourist circuit tomorrow, so I just went for a casual walk in the morning whilst my wife chilled by the pool. The Downtown area is actually quite compact, so it is reasonably easy to cover it all on foot. I walked along Main Street, which effectively runs west to east through the centre until I got to the West End Historic District. This is the location of what was the infamous Texas School Book Depository and nearby is the John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza. Both my wife and I will spend more time there tomorrow.

I walked back via the Thanksgiving Square, where there is a very interesting, spiral chapel, and then back to our hotel.

Our main mission for the day was to go to the Southfork Ranch, as in the 1980s TV series called Dallas, where we had booked to go on a tour. It took about 40 minutes to drive there, so JR Ewing didn’t have a very long commute to deal with every day, as I expect his office building was somewhere near us in the Downtown area (I looked it up and the building used was the Renaissance Tower at 1201 Elm Street, which is the second highest building in Dallas).

We arrived to find a large conference centre and visitors centre, so the Dallas legacy is obviously still going strong. We did wonder just how long it is likely to last - the show ran from 1978 to 1991, so it's only those of us over 40 who are likely to have any significant memories of it. There was a group from Germany on our tour who were visiting relatives in Dallas and the one thing they had requested doing was to visit Southfork. There was also a group from Romania, so the show was truly international.

There was a short tractor ride to the house and then we were taken inside for a talk about the show and the ranch itself. We then had a tour of both the outside and all the rooms inside. The inside is a bit of an anomaly as all the rooms used in the show were actually sets in California, however a more recent renovation of the ranch had tried to replicate the sets, albeit at a much smaller size. As well as the rooms in the TV show being larger than the actual ranch, there were a variety to tricks used to make the outside (and particularly the swimming pool) look larger than it actually is.

The distance between the sets must have made continuity a real problem as, when the characters moved between the outside and the inside, in reality, the two were almost 1,500 miles apart.

The man who owned the ranch at the time got $17 million for its use for the TV show and insisted that it only be used between June and August. He eventually got fed up with all the fans turning up (some even used his pool) so he sold it on. Oh, and if you are interested, guests can now stay in the actual ranch overnight apparently.

There was also a small museum to look around. The Ewing family tree was particularly interesting. There were colour coded lines to show the relationships, i.e. "married", "parent" and "sibling", although I have never seen a family tree with the relationships "dream" and "shot" before. My family tree is so straightforward in comparison (no shootings as far as I know).

We went to a Walmart on the way back and also to a shopping centre for a browse round. The traffic was horrendous and, sadly, we were unable to get any further value from that toll pass by joining the express lane, so we were only able to watch the people using it fly past looking very smug.

For the evening, following our previous experience of brisket (see Texan History Day), we decided to head to another Texan Barbecue and we found one within walking distance to the east of Downtown. We were a bit worried about what kind of area we might be walking through, but we needn't have worried, as we found ourselves in an area called Deep Ellum, which is obviously the place to go in the evening. It was alive and full of places to eat and drink - kind of like Bourbon Street in New Orleans, but without all the noise and chaos and drugs and dancing (see Two Different States Were More Like Two Different Countries).

We found our Texas Barbecue, which was huge and busy - a lot bigger and a lot busier than The Rudy's we had visited back in San Antonio. Outside, you could also see into where they were busy slow-cooking all the meat in these huge metal drums, which is interesting as we had wondered how it was cooked.

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Photos

Southfork Ranch
The home of the 1980s TV show Dallas.

Ewing Family Tree
Complicated - note the key in the bottom left.

Thanksgiving Chapel
The inside spiral ceiling.

Dallas Eyeball
Not something that you see everyday!

Dallas Cattle
Statues of a cattle drive.

Galleria
The inside of the Galleria shopping centre.

Deep Ellum
Approaching this lively area east of Downtown on Main Street.

Terry Black's BBQ
Slow cooking the brisket.

Hotel Room
Very unusual.