Horses and all 5 cows

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This wasn't an actual travel, but I happened to be in Texas. After many many visits of Texas that mostly were like airport - hotel - airport, I finally saw an actual town. Previously, I had an image of Texas as endless highways in the plain view, cookie cutter house complexes and huge shopping malls. Now, I also can picture the horses, cows and saloons.

Some statistics claims that Fort Worth is a big city, but we were actually more interested to see the famous Stockyard Historic District and the daily cattle drive. We saw some images of the drive in the airport and thought it was a big deal there, so we absolutely had to see that. The drive happens every day in the morning and at 4 pm and it's basically cows walking through the street. I guess originally, the cows were going to the field in the morning and returning in the evening.

So, we saw the cows alright, they were well and fed and there were, I don't know, maybe 10 of them. They had the most spectacular horns that spread about a meter on either side of a cow. Wow! This was really cool. They were walking slowly under the command of the cowboys an cowgirls on the horses and the whole thing took about 5 min. So if you are later even a little bit, they are gone.

5 minutes was not satisfactory for us, we wanted to see more cows. Here is where we revealed the truth about the whole famous cow drive. We followed the road where the cows went and got to the next block behind a big building and found that the cows were there standing in the stalls. Apparently, every day, twice a day they just walk around the block, otherwise, they stand there, eat and wait for the next walk around the block. Yeah, here goes all the romanticizing of the Fort Worth biggest attraction. We stared at the cows for a while, and went to search for a saloon. The weather was hot-hot. On the way to the saloon we stopped by the rodeo stadium which was empty at that point because the shows only happen on Saturdays there. We also looked at the Hollywood style stars with the names of the cowboys on the side walks. After all that, we deposited ourselves to a saloon where we spent most of the evening. Oh, right, the steak house wasn't bad either, though I can not speak for the meat since I don't eat it.

Katya

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Photos

Exchange street
This is the street where the cows go every day.

Cattle drive
There are maybe 5 more cows participating in the drive.

Inside rodeo stadium
Too bad we didn't see it in action.

Cows in the stalls
This is where they live the rest of the time when they don't need to imitate the cow drive.

Huge horns
The cows have the most amazing horns