Tag Archives: Dallas

The Byways of Dallas

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Sometimes the road less traveled...

Sometimes the road less traveled...

Dallas, Texas is all together different from Oregon. Goodbye green, hello brown. Goodbye wooded mountains, hello scrubby flatlands. Goodbye rain, hello warm weather and sunny skies. So it’s not all bad.

If Portland was the City of Roses I suppose Dallas has to be the City of Byways. They love a road here, and not just roads – Highway, Parkway, Tollway, Freeway, Expressway, Turnpike – Dallas has them all, no shortages of roads, cars or traffic here.

We’re in town to visit LeeAnne’s brother and his family, and since they are getting ready to move to Houston, we figured we’d better hop to it and do some Dallas sightseeing. Dealey Plaza, where Dallas was founded and President Kennedy was shot was on the list. We visited the “Sixth Floor Museum” dedicated to the events in and around the shooting. We tried to visit the adjacent “Conspiracy Museum” but were told that it is permanently closed (Possibly that is part of the conspiracy as well). We visited Deep Ellum. We experimented with the Tollway versus the Freeway. We drove through a few toll gates that maybe we shouldn’t have driven through and we drove back to Frisco and hung out with LeeAnne’s Fam.

There was a day trip to Austin, but I have to say, aside from the Tacos (which are of very high quality), and the Texas Thrift Store (also of the highest quality), Austin was kind of a letdown. Maybe we should have saved the trip for SxSW, maybe we should have gone to a taping of “Austin City Limits”, maybe we should have just gone Two-Stepping, but we were a bit underwhelmed.

Maybe the most notable part of this leg of our trip is that we are now officially done with our OneWorld tickets! By the paper tickets we’ve had with us since January, we were suppose to fly to Auckland via LA on Oct. 29, but we are headed back to DC. Is the trip over? Kind of. We may go up to New York for a few days, let’s call that “The End”.

Plan D

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Okay, this one is our bad. After getting screwed by the Irish travel agency back at Thanksgiving we decided on another course of action. “Originating” our OWE flight in the UK. It was going to be great, we would fly there for a few hundred, maybe catch a soccer game, stop in Dallas to see LeeAnnes family on the way to New Zealand and be on with our trip.

That’s before we waited two weeks to get the flight to the UK. Now the prices are a lot higher to get there and that again puts us in a situation where, we are making a lot of very tight turn arounds during the holidays and not saving very much cash. I really wished we would have bought the London tickets when we formulated this plan, but we were so exhausted from the whole Ireland thing we just dropped it.

So now the plan is this: We originate our flight in… (drumroll please) New Zealand! Thank you, thank you!

We will pick up the hit of the tickets to NZ, but originating in NZ is still even cheaper than the UK, and WAY cheaper than the US. And we won’t burn any of our North American segments of our OWE tickets so once we get back to the US we can pop around a bit and visit some folks we don’t often get to see. There are benefits.

And this time I am buying the tickets to our originating country as soon as I can.

So, let’s review our history of iteneraries:

  • Plan A – US Depature – Too Expensive, let’s get it cheaper somewhere else.
  • Plan B – Ireland Depature – Cheaper, but the Travel Agents gave us the wrong price. Not as cheap as we had hoped.
  • Plan C – UK Depature – We screwed ourselves and now the cost of the flight over negates most of the savings we would have seen.
  • Plan D – New Zealand Depature – Still cheaper! Significantly streamlines our flights during the holidays, and gives us flights in the US after our RTW trip is over. Who could ask for anything more?

Now, let us never speak of it again.