Big day in Big D, part 2.

After lunch, we walked a few blocks to the West End DART rail station. Our destination: the Dallas Zoo! There's a Dallas Zoo station, so it was easy to board the southbound Red Line downtown and end up steps away from the zoo's entrance.

It had been years since I'd been there, and neither kid had visited. (When you have the FW Zoo so close, why would you need to see Dallas's?) Still, this zoo is much better than I remembered, and it was fun to explore its attractions.

This tunnel connects two sections of the zoo and goes beneath the train tracks and a busy road. It could've been wasted space, but instead it's filled with safari pictures and these tubes that help visitors find different animals (like the "voracious plantain-eater").

At the ticket booth, we found out that the monorail was still running but could close if the temperature got any hotter. That made the monorail first on our "to see" list!

In our mad dash to beat the heat to the monorail, we happened upon the African penguins and just had to stop. It was strange to see them in this sweltering environment, but they were so cute! They'd walk up to our window to say hello.

We were excited to see them swim, too!

We did make it to the monorail before it closed for the day, and we really enjoyed the tour (even if Ryan and I kept saying, "Monorail! Monorail!" the whole time). Our guide gave us an overview of the Wilds of Africa.

Some of the animals were in plain sight, like this guy, but our guide helped us spot the better-camouflaged critters who were hanging out in the shade.

The scenery was neat, too!

Near the end of the tour, our guide told us that the gorillas don't like loud noises, which is why they're not visible from the monorail. She suggested we take the nature trail to see the conservation exhibit.

It was cool (literally—the conservation building that overlooks the gorillas' area is nicely air-conditioned), but I couldn't help but think of the gorilla incident that happened a few years ago.


Of course, we had to take advantage of several photo ops around the zoo!

The kids had Stingray Bay high on their priority list. We shelled out the extra fee to see the shallow pool filled with stingrays ready for petting.

We first touched stingrays at the Downtown Aquarium in Houston, but that had been a while. It was crazy to see these things swim right up to us.

We also got to see the underbelly of a horseshoe crab!

Of course, we saw lots of other animals, too. Because of the heat (which reminded us more than just a little of our San Diego Zoo visit), many of the animals were in the shade or enjoying their indoor accommodations.

(ChaCha has been known to sit like this!)

Jenny, alone since her companion died in May, is moving to a new home this winter. Her destination has caused some controversy.

We walked into several of the aviaries there, which...


...brought on a couple of Enchanted moments! Unfortunately, our singing did not draw any birds to our fingers. (If only we had those seed sticks like at FW!)

Nope. We weren't able to "enchant" any birds there, either.

We did see a ginormous snake, though.

I made Ryan stand next to it so we could tell just how huge he is in comparison (the snake, not Ryan).

Common sight: Ryan tying his shoes!

Before leaving, we stopped by the endangered species carousel. We're fans of fancy carousels, and we've ridden many traditional ones as well as themed ones (like the fish/sea creature one at the Downtown Aquarium).

Of course, this one had zoo animals, and we were impressed with the variety of animals it depicted.

The kids wanted to do the Spongebob 4-D ride, but we saw him chase that pickle countless times at Six Flags. We still had fun with the inflatable, though!

We arrived around 1:30, just hoping we could get a lot of the zoo in before it closed at 5. We ended up leaving around 4:30, partly because of the heat but mostly because of the TRE schedule.

Even though we didn't see several sections of the zoo, we still had a blast. We loved getting to explore a "new" zoo!

Then we were back to the light rail station for our trip north to downtown.

(I LOVE this shadow! We saw lots of cool fences at the zoo.)

Seeing Reunion Tower so far away made it seem like we had a long way to travel, but it only took about 11 minutes to get back to Union Station. We had a slight layover there, but before we knew it, we were aboard the westbound TRE.

We were all so tired! Our feet and even our eyes were worn out!

Ryan and I played tic-tac-toe to pass the time...

...while Katie drew some of her favorite animals

(in this case, the African penguin).

We had a WONDERFUL day! I'm so glad we were able to sneak in this trip before our summer got away from us!

P.S. - If you're planning to use DART, you'll want to look online to know exactly where you're going and print out some maps and schedules. There are signs, but it's helpful to know that you want the red train bound for Westmoreland and not Parker Road, for example.

Big day in Big D.

With our summer dwindling down to the last few days, I decided it was now or never for our Big D adventure. Brett was heading to Oklahoma for a video game convention, so I woke the kids early to say goodbye to him—and to get ready for our own adventure!

It wasn't until we were on our way that I told them we were headed to the TRE station to board a train for Dallas!

It was fun to take this familiar trip via this unfamiliar route! I loved not having to drive, too!

As we pulled into Union Station downtown, we got a close-up view of the Hyatt Regency and Reunion Tower.

Then we walked over to the JFK memorial.

(Katie's counting the number of letters to estimate how much the engraving would've cost the Bradys as in episode 92, Amateur Nite.)

These walls have always reminded me of Legos.

Next we headed to our first stop: 411 Elm Street.

We were on our way to the Sixth Floor Museum, but we were a bit early. To pass time, I got the kids to sit on these steps. I remember them from Don Henley's "End of the Innocence" video, and when I visited Dallas in '90 with my girlfriends, we took our pictures here, too.

I've been here plenty of times, but it's still surreal to walk around Dealey Plaza, to set foot on this place depicted in those grainy old home movies, to see the X on the spot where history was made.

As we walked across the grassy knoll, Ryan kept reiterating how strange it was to be in this very place.

As has been true almost every time I've been here, there were people milling around, buying the assassination "newspapers," pointing to the window and then pointing to the "puff of smoke" fence behind the grassy knoll.

Everybody wants to see this famous building, and since 1989, the Sixth Floor Museum has let those visitors come inside. I've been wanting to check this out for years, and I'm glad we finally got to see it. It was spooky to see the reconstructed sniper's nest at that famous corner window, and the displays and videos were well done. Ryan zoomed right through the audio tour and wound up at the end of the pathway long before I was ready to move on, but both kids picked up most of the pertinent facts about Kennedy's presidency, his assassination and his legacy.

I was curious how much play the conspiracy theories would get, and I was surprised to see the amount of space devoted to those ideas. Years ago my friends and I walked through some assassination museum in West End, and the theories—plausible and wacked-out crazy—were presented there in far more detail. I appreciated that the museum didn't try too hard to stick to the "lone gunman" theory but didn't go nuts with all the possibilities.

The journalism geek in me was also drawn to the media section of the museum. One of my J profs at UT was in the press bus in that motorcade that day, and his stories fascinated me. I've also read a couple of books from reporters' perspectives, and it's so interesting to hear how they reported this horrific event with unprecedented coverage.

For lunch we walked over to Cadillac in West End, where I quizzed the kids to see what they had learned about President Kennedy's life, death and legacy.

The service wasn't great (a huge party right behind us took up all our waitress's time, apparently), but the food was really good. Katie even took up my challenge and ordered SOMETHING BESIDES CHICKEN STRIPS! YEA FOR QUESADILLAS!!!

The kids got sopapillas with their kids' meals, so that was a plus, too.

After lunch we walked to the next part of our Big D day and another leg of our adventures in mass transit: the DART Rail Red Line!