Texas / LBJ National Historical Park / Gruene [Part 3]

As I've previously mentioned, I'm a bit of an American history nerd. So visiting presidential homes is up there on Emma's List of Favourite Places to Visit on an American Road Trip (I have never made this list; it's hypothetical purely for the sake of emphasising a fact). We've done Andrew Jackson's Hermitage, George Washington's Mount Vernon, and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.

This time we skipped forward over a century to visit the home of Lyndon B. Johnson while we were in his homestate. It was a National Park, too, and those are also on Emma's List of Favourite Places to Visit on an American Road Trip, so this was like a double whammy of American history goodness.

(as you can probably tell from these pictures, we like to take pictures with signs that tell us where we are. Good bookends, you know?)

Texas / Fort Worth / Austin [Part 2]

Continuing my tale of my roadtrip around Texas with my parents, after we left Dallas we went onto Fort Worth. On our way there we visited Southfork Ranch, which was the exterior filming location for the 1970s/80s TV show Dallas. I've never actually seen the show - I only really know its place in pop culture because of the whole 'who shot JR' storyline. My parents, it seems, watched it religiously so they were very excited - it was one of the definite Must Dos on our planning list. There was a lot of reminiscing about forgotten storylines and characters during the visit!

Despite my not fully 'getting' it, it was fun to get to visit an actual Texas ranch, and the lady who ran our tour was very informative and enthusiastic, so that definitely helped.

Texas / Dallas [Part 1]

Since 2004, my parents and I have been going on road trips around the United States. Back in 2004 we started with a tour of the Deep South, and since then we've done a whole host of areas of America.

Last September/October it was the turn of Texas. We'd all wanted to do Texas for a long time, so we were excited to finally get around to doing it. We went to so many places that I'm not even going to attempt to fit the whole trip into one post, so I'm going to do a series of Texas posts.

Today we'll start at the beginning with Dallas, which was our first point on the trip.

Chatsworth House

As I mentioned in this post, my university friends and I are all spread across the country so we don't get to see each other on too regular a basis. Luckily, the wonders of WhatsApp means we can all talk and arrange meet ups, which are notoriously difficult to sort out because everyone leads such busy lives (the joys of adulthood!). But when we do manage to arrange something, it's so much fun. Most recently, we met up (sadly minus two of the group) in Derby and stayed with Kate.